Grant Opportunities & News You Can

Barnard College Office of Institutional Funding January 16, 2020 Grant Opportunities & News You Can Use Hello, faculty, I hope you are having a restful break. We’re back with a new issue of our newsletter. For our Featured Funder, we are profiling one of my personal favorite organizations, The American Association of University Women (AAUW). So if you have ever wondered what the connection is between clean drinking water and women in academia, read on. Our Sage Advice column deals with a topic that has been getting increasing attention in recent years: data visualization. In our News section we highlight some of the big developments in federal funding, such as the new budget and the ongoing controversies around Inside this issue research espionage. Featured Funder ...................... 2 Don’t forget to look at the upcoming deadlines. It’s a busy time of year Sage Advice for Competitive with opportunities ranging from “Sharjah International Book Fair Proposals ................................ 3 Translation Grant” to the “NSF’s Perception, Action, Cognition grant.” News ........................................ 4 Fellowships After that, be sure to check out upcoming grant opportunities. If you want to see those deadlines throughout the year, go to the Grants Calendar and General .................................... 5 Fellowship Calendar on the External Grant Opportunities page on the Arts & Humanities .................. 7 Barnard website. The next internal grant deadline is January 31st. See Creative Arts…………………………..9 Barnard’s website here for more information. Social Science .......................... 11 As always, if you need assistance finding grants or beginning an Education ................................ 12 application, please feel free to send an email to me or any of the other Language & Area Studies ......... 13 members of the Institutional Funding and Sponsored Research team. STEM ....................................... 14 Liane Carlson Deadline Reminders 212-870-2524 General Interest ...................... 17 [email protected] Arts & Humanities ................... 19 On Twitter @BarnardIFSR Education ................................ 23 Social Sciences ......................... 23 Language & Area Studies ......... 25 STEM ....................................... 26 Library Sciences ....................... 28 Featured Funder The AAUW If you’ve ever used the word “ecology,” enjoyed the daily miracle of drinking water without sewage mixed in, or studied science as a female undergraduate, you can thank Ellen H. Swallows Richards, co- founder of The American Association of University Women (AAUW). Richards was born in 1842 in Dunstable, Massachusetts, the only child of a shopkeeper and his wife. Though their means were relatively modest, the family had enough money to send her to Westford Academy in Massachusetts, one of the oldest high schools in the U.S. There she learned, among other things, French and German, relatively unusual accomplishments at the time that allowed her easily to find work as a tutor. The money she earned enabled her to enter Vassar. From there, her life became a succession of historic firsts. She was the first woman in the U.S. to earn a degree in chemistry, the first woman admitted to MIT (though with the caveat, "it being understood that her admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission of females"), and the first female lecturer at MIT, establishing its first female-led laboratory. She even prompted the passage of the first food safety laws, after she found chloride in sugar during a study of consumer products. It was during her time as an (unpaid) lecturer at MIT that Richards met Marion Talbot (1858-1948), daughter of the dean of Boston University Medical School and an activist mother. By the time Talbot began studying with Richards at MIT, she already had an AB and AM from Boston University. Still, the conditions at MIT were hostile enough to women at the time that she briefly dropped out and only finished the degree in 1888. Like Richards, Talbot also went on to have a groundbreaking career. In 1892 she took a position as assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Anthropology at the newly established University of Chicago and then in 1899 became Dean of Women. In 1881 Richards and Talbot invited a handful of alumnae from local colleges to what is now seen as the inaugural meeting of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, the AAUW’s predecessor. Gradually, the ACA expanded to include women across the country and in 1885 conducted its first major research project to debunk the belief that excessive education for women caused infertility. In 1889 the ACA merged with the Western Association of College Alumnae, founding the AAUW as we know it. Today the AAUW offers scholarships, fellowships, and funding for community action grants. All deadlines are TBA but will be included in our profiles as they come due. “Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowships are designed to assist scholars in obtaining tenure and other promotions by enabling them to spend a year pursuing independent research. The primary purpose of the fellowship is to increase the number of women in tenure-track faculty positions and to promote equity for women in higher education. Tenured professors are not eligible.” Funding: $30,000. “Short-Term Research Publication Grants provide funds for women college and university faculty to prepare research for publication. Time must be available for eight consecutive weeks of final writing and editing in response to issues raised in critical reviews. These grants can be awarded to both tenure -track and part-time faculty, and new and established researchers. The grants are designed to assist the candidate in obtaining tenure and other promotions. Tenured professors are not eligible.” Funding: $6,000. “Community Action Grants provide funds to individuals, AAUW branches, and AAUW state organizations as well as local community-based nonprofit organizations for innovative programs or non -degree research projects that promote education and equity for women and girls.” Funding: $2,000– $7,000 over One Year; $5,000–$10,000 over Two Years. 2 Return to table of contents Sage Advice for Competitive Proposals Data Visualization For today’s Sage Advice column, I want to draw your attention to a November 12, 2019, article by Betsy Mason titled“ Why scientists need to be better at data visualization.” You may recall this article from our November issue, where we linked to it in our News section, in which case, carry on! For those of you who haven’t read it, though, it’s worth looking at Mason’s overview of what works, and why, in data presentation. The problem with current attitudes to data visualization, Mason argues, is that scientists treat it as an afterthought. “As a result, science is littered with poor data visualizations that confound readers and can even mislead the scientists who make them. Deficient data visuals can reduce the quality and im- pede the progress of scientific research. And with more and more scientific images making their way into the news and onto social media — illustrating everything from climate change to disease out- breaks — the potential is high for bad visuals to impair public understanding of science.” Different charts are better and worse for displaying different types of relationships. A bar chart, for example, is generally easy to read and helpful for situations where the reader needs to see comparisons between average quantities. They fail, however, in cases where the reader wants to see how many data points make up the sample size, whether there are patterns or subgroups within the data, and in small sample sizes where outliers have a disproportionate power to skew the data. (For example, imag- ine I am comparing the average gift size between two years of fundraising. In one year I receive two donations, one of $1 and one of $999,999. In the other I received 10 gifts of $500,000 each. In both cases, my average gift size is $500,000. In a bar chart, they look exactly equal.) Color can be an effective way to display data, but only if the researcher avoids some common pitfalls associated with the rainbow color scale and corrects for possible color blindness in the reader. One such problem is that color is not particularly intuitive. It is not obvious whether, for example, blue rep- resents a larger quantity than green. “An even bigger problem,” the article continues, “is that the rainbow is perceived unevenly by the human brain. People see color in terms of hue (such as red or blue), saturation (intensity of the color), and lightness (how much white or black is mixed in). Human brains rely most heavily on lightness to interpret shapes and depth and therefore tend to see the brightest colors as representing peaks and darker colors as valleys. But the brightest color in the rainbow is yel- low, which is usually found somewhere in the middle of the scale, leading viewers to see high points in the wrong places.” Similarly, heat maps can easily confuse the reader. “A heat map is a two-dimensional matrix, basically a table or grid, that uses color for each square in the grid to represent the values of the underlying data. Lighter and darker shades of one or more hues indicate lower or higher values.” Shades, though, can look radically different depending on their surrounding colors, leading readers to misinterpret the values represented on the graph. Finally, some charts are not very helpful in most cases. The pie chart receives particularly scorn in Ma- son’s article, with one expert writing,“ the only design worse than a pie chart is several of them.” For more on data visualization, see: Mason, Betsy. “Why scientists need to be better at data visualization” in Knowable Magazine.Wong, Bang. “Points of View” in Nature Methods. Return to table of contents 3 News From the NSF From the NIH “NSF releases JASON report on research security.” “NIH director pledges to move quickly on Posted on December 11, 2019.

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