The Office for Research and Sponsored Project congratulates the following faculty, staff and administrators on their recent awards.

Alissa Crans, National Security Agency, $32,222
Mathematics
Dr. Crans will spend nine months employed at the National Security Agency through a sabbatical fellowship working on projects that involve cryptanalysis, coding theory, number theory, discrete mathematics, statistics, probability, and many other subjects. 

Cheryl Grills, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation $694,936
Psychology
Enhancement funds to enhance and improve the scale and capacity of the Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE) evaluation.

Magaly Lavadenz, National Security Agency, $100,000
Center for Equity for English Language Learners
Chinese Teacher Language Preparation: Summer Institute for 2010. Language Teacher Preparation by initiating the fourth cohort of teacher candidates through our 6–week-long program leading to the certification of 35 qualified teachers of Mandarin in K-12 bilingual immersion or foreign language classrooms in California.

Holli Levitsky, Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University, $2,500 + expenses
Jewish Studies and English
Dr. Levitsky has been invited to join a select group of academics from the U.S. and across the world who, over the last seven years, have used the Summer Institute as a means of enhancing their knowledge of Israel Studies to develop existing courses or introduce new ones.

Todd Otanicar, National Science Foundation, $307,000
Mechanical Engineering
RUI: Controlling the Spectral Radiative Properties of a Dispersion of Core‐Shell Multifunctional Nanoparticles. The project is to create a new class of nanomaterials that will allow for the dynamic control of the optical properties of liquid-particle suspensions. The requested funds will support the development of analytical models to predict these fundamental changes as well as support for undergraduates to travel to ASU to fabricate and characterize the materials.

Todd Otanicar, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, $22,000
Mechanical Engineering
FaST: The Presence of Uncertainty in the Optimization of Commercial Building Usage. This project is intended to support a faculty member and two students for an eight-week summer fellowship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This project looks to incorporate uncertainty into the building optimization problem in relation to the total lifestyle cost and energy savings metrics currently used in conjunction with the OptEPlustool.

Jeremy Pal, National Science Foundation, $211,410
Civil Engineering
Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models (EaSM). This project investigates the interaction between human land use and the environment through the example of West Africa. This pilot project will assess the impact of the land use-climate interactions on regional climate where such interactions are expected to be strong. We will evaluate the need for incorporating land use modeling into climate prediction models using West Africa.

Barbara Rico, Lilly Fellows Program, $3,000
English
The grant asks for support establishing a Lilly Faculty Seminar on campus. The proposal outlines an academically rigorous and interdisciplinary seminar in which 15-16 faculty members from across the campus would meet four to five times per year. The final meeting of the year would include a musical performance, poetry reading or other creative arts presentation which would approach the mission-related theme for the year.

Gregory Ruzzin, Northrop Grumman Corporation, $5,000
Production Film and Television
A feature-length documentary profiling 6-10 middle and high school student teams from across the U.S. as they participate in the Botball Educational Robotics Program at their schools, and design, build and program autonomous robots to be entered in the 2011 and 2012 regional and national Botball competitions.

Maureen Schaukowitch, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, $10,000
Career Development Services
Visual Storytelling While Staying Grounded in Humanism, Innovation and Diversity. Provide ten (10) students with internship opportunities in conjunction with the School of Film and Television, other colleges (Communication and Fine Arts, Business, Liberal Arts), Career Development Services and several film production companies that explicitly state social justice/social awareness in their mission statements.

Tracy Shaw, U.C. Irvine/U.S. Department of Education, $10,000
Student Psychological Services
In an effort to reduce the negative impact of alcohol use, Student Psychological Services proposes to implement an alcohol abuse education and prevention program utilizing both Alcohol 101 Plus and “e-CHUG” content, which are evidence-based, comprehensive alcohol prevention tools to education and motivate students to make healthy decisions.