Geneva Laurita was awarded the prestigious Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. Congratulations, Geneva! More…

Congratulations to Carrie Diaz Eaton, who has received a $1,000,000 2-year grant from the  to continue the development and work of the , a virtual synthesis center that provides community support, training, professional development, and open access curricular resources opportunities to STEM educations and institutional leaders.

Associate Professor of Music

Congratulations to Asha Tamirisa, Associate Professor of Music, who has received funding from the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund Early Development Grant program! The funding will support the initial stages of a new project, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which will be a documentary using wildfire smoke as a material, metaphor, and method to explore attitudes towards climate change.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Congratulations to Justin Baumann, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, who has received funding from the ‘s National Science Foundation program to support his project studying mussel populations in the intertidal zones of the Gulf of Maine. This award will fund genetic sequencing of mussels collected by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ undergrads over the past summer to identify subpopulations of mussels that may be better able to adapt to changing water temperatures. Collection and analysis of the mussels and sequencing data will be part of the honors theses of two seniors in Justin’s lab this year.

Assistant Professor of Biology

Eric LeFlore, Assistant Professor of Biology, has received funding from the ‘s National Science Foundation program to support his project comparing surveying techniques for Maine bobcats. The funding will support the purchase of additional wildlife cameras, a need identified by preliminary studies, and strengthen collaborations with colleagues at the University of Maine Orono and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, while setting the stage for a long-overdue assessment of bobcat distributions in Maine. In addition, the grant will support three undergraduate students, providing an opportunity for paid scientific training in a field-based wildlife ecology and conservation biology research program. Congratulations, Eric!

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Dr. Yun Garrison, Assistant Professor of Psychology, has been awarded a grant from the to develop a new psychological measure that explores people’s sense of collective hope in the aftermath of community trauma. This project is part of her ongoing community-engaged scholarship dedicated to fostering healing and growth within the Lewiston-Auburn community. Psychology students from her Community-Based Research Methods and Community-Based Thesis Seminar courses are collaborating with her, gaining hands-on experience in advancing research that bridges psychological science and community resilience. Through this work, she aims to make collective hope more visible, speakable, and actionable as a resource for healing and resilience.

Associate Professor of Neuroscience

Congratulations to Jason Castro, Associate Professor of Neuroscience on his recent NIH Maine INBRE pilot funding award. The central goal of the project is to use graph neural networks (GNNs), a type of deep learning architecture to understand how molecular features of smells are represented as maps of activity in the brain. In the process, Jason hopes to be able to address a debate in the field of olfaction between two competing hypotheses about how the brain encodes smells – the “ecologicalâ€� coding hypothesis, which predicts that the brain organizes molecules by their shared behavioral relevance or ecological utility (e.g. ‘predator’, ‘prey’, ‘food’, ‘fermented’ odors), vs. the “physicochemicalâ€� coding hypothesis, which predicts that smells are organized by intrinsic chemical properties (functional group, molecular weight, polarity, etc).

This pilot funding supports the migration of Jason’s research toward an exclusive focus on neural computation and provides support for several undergraduates with different levels of computational experience.

Associate Professor of Economics

Congratulations to Associate Professor of Economics Sandra Goff, who has received a National Science Foundation award from the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program (HEGS) to support her research on programs that compensate landowners who manage their land for ecological services. Read more…

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Congratulations to Ryan Cole, who has received a grant from the National Science Foundation EMpowering BRoader Academic Capacity and Education () program. The project, entitled EMBRACE-AGS-Growth: Advancing Temperature-Dependent Absorption Models to Support Next-Generation Remote Sensing, involves the development of a low-temperature spectroscopy facility at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to enable sensitive studies of methane spectra in the laboratory. The project will support a collaboration with researchers at UC Boulder who will perform similar experiments in a high-temperature test environments to enable broadband, high accuracy methane reference spectroscopy over temperatures spanning -40 to over 700°C. Funding from the project will support several ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ undergraduate researchers, and through the collaboration with UC Boulder, provide ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students with technical training on state-of-the-art, NSF-funded laboratory and field-measurement resources.

Associate Professor of Education

Congratulations to Mara Tieken, who, along with collaborators, was recently awarded a grant from the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to study the field of rural-serving college access organizations and identify qualities and practices that appear to positively influence student outcomes. This is part of a the work of the National Education Research and Development Center for Improving Rural Postsecondary Education.