This summer I will begin a project titled Talking About Dating Relationships. This project builds upon the finding that romantic relationships, particularly marriages and dynamics between spouses (for example, conflict), can have a variety of effects with regard to individuals’ internal physical state (for example, blood pressure) and health outcomes. My study extends this work in two important ways. First, I will be focusing on how characteristics of dating relationships (for example, closeness) affect dating partners’ stress hormones before, during and after an emotional discussion. Second, I will be investigating how talking to a friend after this discussion affects these physical responses. This work will allow us to begin understanding how dating relationships affect health as well as how and why talking to friends and family about stressful dating relationship events might prove beneficial.
Jonathan
Dingwell
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Most often, if a clinician thinks someone may be at risk of falling, he or she will test that person’s standing balance. However, most people who fall do so while they are moving (usually walking). Consequently, measures of standing balance are not good at predicting these falls. This is mainly because standing and walking are different tasks that have different requirements in terms of stability and the muscle coordination patterns required to achieve that stability.
The purpose of our project is to develop and test a new method for quantifying a person’s dynamic stability while her or she is standing or walking. During either of these tasks, a person’s movements will vary and change over time. One can think of these small fluctuations in behavior as very small, naturally occurring perturbations to the system. Our approach involves directly quantifying the effects of these subtle perturbations over time.
We will test healthy subjects across a wide range of ages standing and walking to determine what, if any, relationship exists between the stability properties of these two seemingly very different activities.
We hope these experiments will lead to more accurate methods for predicting who has the greatest risk of falling so that those patients can receive appropriate and timely treatment.
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Developing Tools for Glycobiology
When we think about carbohydrates, or sugars, we tend to think about table sugar in our coffee, but this family of molecules has an importance to biology that goes beyond sweets.
Carbohydrates are attached to the lipids and proteins of our cells and thus form a coat, or glycocalyx, around them. These cell surface sugars control a myriad of cellular processes, including cell differentiation, cell-cell adhesion and virus-cell recognition. Despite their importance, tools for the systematic study of these alterations are woefully underdeveloped.
My work is focused on creating new methods of studying carbohydrate function which include arrays for rapid identification of carbohydrates and inhibitors of the enzymes that form certain sugar epitopes.
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Speech Development Following Cochlear Implantation:
Evaluation Using the Frame-Content Theory
I will evaluate data from 40 children who have received cochlear implants to investigate the process in which they acquire speech over time.
Normal hearing children typically use predictable patterns of sounds in the initial stages of development and often revert to those patterns when challenged by more complex sound patterns in words.
I will investigate if those same patterns of development exist for profoundly deaf children who have received cochlear implants and what the course of development of speech is over time. This work will shed light on the process of acquisition, and it is hoped, influence intervention techniques and strategies used with these children.
The Experience of Time at Work: Mechanism, Outcomes and Moderators
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The modern industrial organization transformed time into capital and, in the process, fundamentally shifted the way its members relate to each other and to their work. Even in an age of globalization, in which this received view of time is becoming shared or acknowledged by many cultures around the world, organizational members and researchers are still struggling to understand exactly how this transformation affects us and, ultimately, what it means for our lives.
My project applies an integrated problem-centered approach to these questions. Rather than developing “time-saving” social technologies that simply reinforce an already increasing pace of life for organizational members or limiting the research aim to the documentation and lamentation of the problems created by the modern organizations’ approach toward time, this project centers around three interconnected goals: understanding the sources of these challenges, exploring typical outcomes and unearthing strategies that will contribute to healthier organizational and individual outcomes.
Writing Against Type: Race, Gender and Comparative Black Modernism
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I will use my 2004 Summer Research Assignment to fund research and writing for my book project “Writing against Type: Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism.” A study of African American and French Caribbean women writers from the 1920s through the 1940s, “Writing against Type” explores how early 20th century questions of race, identity and nationality are negotiated by writers working outside of the traditional notions of heroism embodied by the archetypes of the New Negro and the Negritude hero.
I contend that it is because of the predominance of masculine figures and male writers that the work of Black modernist women has been left to the obscurity of the archive, as in the case of Guadeloupean novelist Suzanne Lacascade (dates unknown) and African American essayist and short fiction writer Marita Bonner (1899-1971), or overshadowed by that of their more prominent peers, as in the case of Martinican essayist Suzanne Césaire (1913-1966) and African American novelist Dorothy West (1907-1998).
I will conduct archival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. I hope my findings will shed more light on the apparently abbreviated career of the little-known Lacascade, for whom substantiated biographical information is scarce.
I will spend the second half of the award period revising existing portions of manuscript before drafting a new chapter exploring the connections between the heroic archetypes prevalent in Black modernist literature and the representations of African diasporic subjects by European and Anglo-American modernists.
Competition in Banking and Economic Growth: The Cross-Country Evidence
It is well established that one of the robust predictors of economic growth is the overall development of a country’s financial system. Both the theoretical and the empirical literature on the subject have largely focused on the role of a competitive financial system. By contrast, most actual financial systems are quite concentrated.
Moreover, and perhaps surprisingly, some theoretical work points to channels through which a monopolistic financial system may enhance growth. There is, however, almost no empirical work on how plausible and quantitatively significant these effects are.
In earlier work, I have found some preliminary evidence suggesting that a more concentrated financial system enhances productivity growth but suppresses savings.
My summer research project is to continue with the empirical analysis of the macroeconomic effects of competition versus monopoly in the financial system. I will use the newly available World Bank database “Financial Development and Structure” to obtain more detailed information on concentration in banking in various countries at various time periods. Having better data than before will also let me use more sophisticated econometric techniques.
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Envisioning the Nation: National Identity in Threatening Times
Countries include, to varying degrees, citizens who stand out due to factors such as place of birth, ethnicity, language and religion. My research finds that these distinctive citizens manifest less attachment to their country than do more central citizens.
I then investigate what kinds of political and cultural conditions help increase the attachment of distinctive groups. For example, I investigate the general level of tolerance in a society, its level and type of democracy, and its degree of economic inequality.
These results speak directly to the challenge of building a cohesive polity when a country contains a multiplicity of ethnic groups.
Theoretical and Observational Studies of Physics of the Early Universe
and the Formation of the First-Generation Stars
Our understanding of the nature of the universe has advanced very rapidly in the last few years, being largely driven by rapid advance in observations: the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite has made accurate measurements of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has made the largest map of galaxy distribution in the universe.
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As observations become better, we can see the more distant universe, or equivalently, the younger universe. In fact, now we are beginning to approach the earliest moment of the universe, the so-called inflationary era, with the observational facilities measuring clustering pattern of microwave fluctuations and galaxies in a distant universe, whose seed fluctuations were generated during inflation.
In other words, signature of inflation is imprinted on clustering of galaxies and microwave radiation on the sky.
(The younger universe means the hotter, higher energy universe. When inflation occurs, the energy is so high that none of the particle accelerators on Earth will ever reach it; thus, cosmology is the only place where one can look for signature of very high energy physics, which has been studied purely theoretically by particle physicists worldwide.)
The rapid progress in observations urges theorists to establish tools to extract more scientific information from the data. In particular, a little is known as to how distant galaxies are clustered.
With colleagues in UT Astronomy we are proposing to measure clustering of galaxies in a distant universe, which requires us to develop new tools to interpret the data.
During this summer, I shall develop necessary tools to constrain physics of inflation using those data. The tools include realistic numerical simulations of the distant galaxies, and the analysis tool to measure the clustering pattern and compare to theoretical predictions of inflation.
General
information about Summer Research Assignments
Applications
for summer 2005 SRAs
Workshop for
summer 2005 SRAs
List of summer
2004 SRA winners
