·      John Cort, professor of religion, was awarded a Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars for 2012-13 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), in the amount of $50,400 for his project, “The Devotional Culture of the Digambar Jains in North India.”

·      Ashwin Lall, assistant professor of computer science, is a co-principal investigator, along with Jun Xu of Georgia Institute of Technology, on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant of $349,703 over three years for a project titled “Towards Principled Network Troubleshooting via Efficient Packet Stream Processing.”

·      Joseph Reczek, assistant professor of chemistry, was awarded a grant of $200,000 over three years from the NSF for support of the project “RUI: Developing Organic Photoconductive Materials through Modular Design of Self-Assembling Components.”

 

“Educating undergraduates is the central activity of the Denison faculty. But we count on Denison professors to be absolutely up to date on what they teach, and the best way to do that is for them to be active contributors to scholarship,” says Denison President Dale T. Knobel. “Likewise, a liberal arts education is an education for life, and we count on Denison faculty to model lifetime learning for our students. It is especially gratifying when faculty earn the acclaim of scholarly peers across the nation and receive significant research support. The Denison community is proud of these newest achievements.”

 

Cort’s fellowship will allow him a year’s leave from teaching to complete a book based on a decade of fieldwork in north India, as well as library and archival research in India and the United States. In addition to the grant from the NEH, research has been funded by a senior fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a Denison University R. C. Good Fellowship, and several grants from the Denison University Research Foundation.

 

Lall will collaborate with Xu as well as with scientists at AT&T Research to design algorithms for handling the immense datasets generated within large Internet networks. These algorithms will allow network operators to measure what is happening in their networks and to diagnose anomalies without being inundated by the deluge of data. The research is an extension of Lall’s doctoral and postdoctoral research, which also was funded by the NSF.

 

Solar energy research is the center of Reczek’s grant from the NSF. His work is focused on the development of new organic-based materials with an overarching goal of efficient and cost-effective capture of solar energy. Reczek’s approach is to design several series of component molecules that are relatively simple and affordable by themselves, but when combined with each other will have the advanced properties desired of photovoltaic materials. The grant will support chemicals and supplies, as well as funding nine full-time summer research student positions over the three-year period. It also will support new equipment, a synthetic microwave reactor and near-infrared spectrometer, which are necessary for completion of the work and also will be used to enhance the cutting-edge student experience in Denison’s department of chemistry and biochemistry.