The past fiscal year was a banner year for sponsored programs at Perimeter College. The College received a record $3.8 million for programs for the fiscal year 2022, far surpassing our original target of $876,435.
A significant number of these awards were from the Department of Education, with the highest dollars obtained through the Predominately Black Institutions (PBI) grants.
Of note was the establishment of the Center for Outreach and Research Engagement (CORE), which enlists faculty across many disciplines to help students engage in research. Dr. Anyee’ Payne oversees and directs CORE. Dr. Charles Fox is the PI of the CORE project.
These awards enhance the capacity of our college to establish and strengthen STEM and research programs. I wanted to thank all of the faculty who worked hard on obtaining these important grants that are all aimed at helping our students succeed.
Special thanks go to the Office of Grants Development and Administration (OGDA) staff led by Glenn Pfeifer, who were instrumental in securing these grants.
I also wanted to mention two programs of note established this past year with the support of the Dean’s Office:
- The Dean’s Summer Scholarship Writing Program and
- The Sponsored Programs Academy for Collaborative Excellence (SPACE)
The SPACE program is a grant writing course taught by the OGDA. Two teams are currently working on National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation grant proposals. Dr. Micah Lewin (Philosophy), Dr. Jennifer Meeks (Philosophy), and Dr. Rosamond Rodman (Religious Studies and Humanities) are writing a proposal for the NEH’s Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges grant.
Decatur biology professors Dr. Samantha Andrews and Dr. Gladys Bolding are writing a proposal for NSF’s Advancing Innovation and Impact in Undergraduate STEM Education at Two-year Institutions of Higher Education grant.
SPACE is a year-long program, which begins in conjunction with the start of faculty contracts in August and ends in May/June.
Last spring, Georgia State President M. Brian Blake sent out a call for proposals for the Research Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) challenge grants. I wanted to again congratulate lead PI John King, and co-PIs Jay Dunn, Janna Blum, Vivian Mativo and Sahithya Reddivari who were awarded a $50,000 seed grant their project to create the Perimeter College Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Research Collaborative to help faculty across disciplines share and engage in research.
Thirty-eight proposals from different colleges and schools of Georgia State were submitted for the challenge, so to receive this award is no small feat. I also wanted to congratulate Kathy Dolan and Nicole Lynch, who also received a $50,000 seed grant from the RISE challenge to work with their colleagues on the Atlanta Campus. Their grant helps fund the Southern Urban Research for Growth and Equity (SURGE) which will form an adult cohort for ongoing health research.
Faculty Research Highlights
Dr. Amanda Ellwanger, anthropology instructor, was awarded a $330,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The NSF Build and Broaden 3.0 Initiative to conduct research on primates in Indonesia was awarded to Ellwanger, along with Erin Riley and Henry Scharf of San Diego State University. The project enables Perimeter College students to participate in research both in Georgia and in Indonesia. The students will be fully funded to participate in research abroad.
Dr. Samantha Andrews and Dr. Gladys Bolding received a seed grant and piloted their first Research Experience for Teachers in Engineering and Computer Science this past June for DeKalb County middle and high school science teachers. Part of the program was radon research in collaboration with Dr. Ashwin Ashok, assistant professor of computer science on the Atlanta Campus. Andrews and Bolding are now writing a NSF grant, the Interdisciplinary Summer Research Experience at the Intersection of the Environmental Science, Sensing, and Computing to continue this program.
Dr. Jay Dunn, associate professor astronomy and physics, continues to collaborate with various universities as well as his colleagues on the Atlanta Campus. Dunn is currently working on spectral analysis of COS data obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope. He is working with Dr. Steve Kraemer of The Catholic University of America and Dr. Gerry Kriss of the Space Telescope Science Institute. Dunn also is working on publishing a paper with Dr. Mike Crenshaw of Georgia State on analyzing the variability observed in the Seyfert galaxy NGC3783. He sits on the dissertation committee of his former Perimeter—and now Georgia State physics doctoral student Braven Lyall.
Dr. Mathes Dayananda, assistant professor of physics is continuing his collaboration with his Georgia State Atlanta Campus colleague Dr. Unil Perera, on diagnosis techniques for cancer diseases in the early stages. Two of his students who started research with him at Perimeter are now at Georgia Tech and continuing their research with both Dayananda and Perera.
In 2022, we launched a new Research website to highlight all the good work going on at this college. This website is an opportunity to highlight faculty publications and research. Check it out, and please send me updates on your work.