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2/16/23

By ARHU Staff

In support of programs, initiatives and projects designed to impact enduring and emerging societal issues, the University of Maryland’s Grand Challenges Grants Program has awarded $30 million in funding to 50 projects and 185 faculty members across every school and college on campus. Among them, ARHU faculty are the recipients of one Institutional Grant, three Impact Awards, four Team Project Grants and one Individual Project Grant.

ARHU faculty are partnering with colleagues across campus to focus on groundbreaking and impactful research on topics including racial and social justice, education, pandemic preparedness and ethical technologies. Their work will shape the future of our community, state, nation and world.

Grand Challenges Grants with ARHU faculty involvement are outlined below. Please visit each project page for comprehensive details and a full list of participating faculty.

INSTITUTIONAL GRANT (up to $1M per year for 3 years of funding): 

Maryland Initiative for Literacy & Equity (MILE): seeks to transform and integrate practices in education, speech pathology, library sciences, and parent/family engagement through streamlined and cutting-edge models of professional development and community outreach. (Colleges Represented: College of Education (EDUC), ARHU, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS), College of Information Studies (INFO), School of Public Policy (SPP))

Principal Investigator (PI): Donald Bolger (EDUC)

ARHU Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): 

Kira Gor, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Colin Phillips, Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Department of Linguistics; Director, Language Science Center

Juan Uriagereka, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Department of Linguistics

Learn more: research.umd.edu/mile

IMPACT AWARDS (up to $250K per year for 2 years of funding): 

Urban Equity Collaborative: seeks to strengthen community-based institutions and the work of community activists around issues of urban inequality. (Colleges Represented: School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (ARCH), ARHU, School of Public Health (SPHL))

PI: Willow Lung-Amam (ARCH)

ARHU Co-PI: Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/urbanequity

Pandemic Preparedness Institute (PPI): integrates a broad array of social and behavioral sciences to learn from COVID-19 and other disasters to better prepare for future public health emergencies. (Colleges Represented: SPHL, ARHU, BSOS, EDUC, INFO, Philip Merrill College of Journalism (JOUR))

Co-PI: Cynthia Bauer (SPHL) 

ARHU Co-PI and team members: 

Brooke Fisher Liu (Co-PI), Professor, Department of Communication

Anita Atwell Seate, Associate Professor, Department of Communication

Carina Zelaya, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication

Learn more: research.umd.edu/ppi

Values-Centered Artificial Intelligence: aims to promote the development of AI in a way that is not only ethical, but that advances human well-being more generally. (Colleges Represented: College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), ARHU, Robert H. Smith School of Business (BMGT), BSOS, EDUC, INFO, JOUR, SPHL) 

PI: Hal Daumé III (CMNS)

ARHU Co-PI: John Horty, Professor, Department of Philosophy

Learn more: research.umd.edu/vcai

TEAM PROJECT GRANTS (up to $500K per year for 3 years of funding):

Africa Through Language and Area Studies (ATLAS): will establish a central focal point for the study of African languages, history and contemporary issues in the UMD community with the goal of increasing the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, BSOS) 

ARHU PI: Miranda Abadir, Second Language Acquisition, National Foreign Language Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/atlas

Music Education for All: aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, VAIolin, that will democratize music education. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, CMNS) 

ARHU PI: Irina Muresanu, Associate Professor, School of Music

Learn more: research.umd.edu/music-ai

Fostering Inclusivity Through Technology (FIT): will develop a video-calling platform that promotes mutual understanding by highlighting team sentiment, building rapport with strangers, connecting past and current topics in conversations, and unobtrusively identifying and resolving misunderstandings. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, BGMT, CMNS, A. James Clark School of Engineering (ENGR), INFO) 

PI: Yi Ting Huang (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PI: Shevaun Lewis, Assistant Research Professor and Assistant Director, Language Science Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/fit

Anti-Black Racism Initiative: seeks to build upon the state of Maryland’s legacy of racial equity and social justice and will position the University of Maryland as a leading anti-Black racist institution through three strategic and institutional initiatives that will amplify the new anti-Black racism (ABR) minor. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, EDUC, SPHL)

PI: Jeanette Snider (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PIs: 

John Drabinski, Professor, African American Studies and English, Department of English

Psyche Williams-Forson, Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/abri

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT GRANT (up to $50,000 per year for 3 years): 

Human Rights Politics and Policies: Lessons from Latin America: two conferences, three articles and an edited volume that provides a definitive history of human rights in Latin America and corrects overly broad criticisms of human rights movements made by scholars who work on the United States and Europe. (College Represented: ARHU) 

Karin Rosemblatt, Professor and Director of the Center for Historical Studies, Department of History

Learn more: research.umd.edu/human-rights-latin-america

10/12/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Students of science in the United States are likely to recognize the names and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and Charles Darwin. Fewer may know of the many influential curanderos, cosmologists and agriculturists from across the Americas whose work has impacted science across the globe for centuries. 

Thanks to a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, a new project led by Professor of History Karin Rosemblatt aims to establish how Latin America’s popular, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities were “never on the periphery of scientific developments.” 

“We aim to shift emphasis away from the discoveries of a few scientific geniuses and to foreground instead the many contributors to scientific work—porters, local guides, wives and family members, technicians, herbal specialists,” said Rosemblatt, who is also the director of UMD’s Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies. 

The project, “Placing Latin America and the Caribbean in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine,” will bring together senior and established researchers and graduate students in the field of HSTEM (History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine) in Latin America and the Caribbean. The network will secure ties among researchers in North and South America, produce publications that make their research widely available and provide training and mentoring to graduate students.  

Rosemblatt, whose research focuses on the transnational study of gender, race, ethnicity and class, has already coordinated a 13-person steering committee made up of scholars at different stages of their careers working in Latin America and the United States. The committee members specialize in different time periods, geographic regions and topics. They include: Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, Mexico City); Eve Buckley (University of Delaware); Marcos Cueto (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro); Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania); Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Carlos López Beltrán (National Autonomous University of Mexico); Camilo Quintero (UNIANDES, Colombia); Megan Raby (University of Texas at Austin); Julia Rodriguez (University of New Hampshire); Carlos Sanhueza Cerda (Universidad de Chile); Elisa Sevilla Perez (Universidad de San Francisco, Quito); and Adam Warren (University of Washington, Seattle). Ana Luísa Reis Castro (MIT) will serve as graduate student representative. 

Next steps involve growing the network and building out a website. 

Through the materials produced by the network, teachers of students of all ages will also gain access to bibliographies, lesson plans, essays and collections of syllabi that allow them to cover a broader range of scientific endeavors and a more diverse community of scientists, Rosemblatt said. 

“We hope to convince other historians, students and the broader public that the Western scientific tradition developed in conversation with other, often colonized, peoples,” she said.   

Image: “Two views of Cabo Tres Montes” (Chile), 1891, via memoriachilena.cl

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