The Research and Productive Scholarship (R&PS) Awards, which range from $4,800 to $15,000 and total $300,000 and are intended as seed grants that will lead to external funding or to support scholarship that could not otherwise be funded.

“At least two-thirds of the nearly 90 proposals we received were very good, worthy of funding, and would elevate the research profile of the University,” said Gordon Baylis, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and chair of the R&PS Awards Committee. “We were able to fund only about 30 percent of the proposals but were very pleased with the quality.”

Each proposal was sent to ad hoc reviewers within respective academic discipline, as well as review by the committee.

Many of this year’s award recipients are recently appointed faculty members such as Rheeda Walker, an assistant professor in psychology who joined USC in August 2002 and plans to use her award to study factors associated with suicide among African-American men.

“I’ll be looking at a community population of about 400 people to measure how stress and the removal of certain cultural protective factors might be affecting male suicide rates,” Walker said.

Since 1970, suicide rates among black men have surged, a phenomenon Walker attributes to acculturation, the loss of social protective factors such as family and church, and adoption of norms and beliefs and pathological behavior of the majority culture.

“I want to do a long-term study, perhaps funded by the National Institutes for Health, with chronically suicidal subjects. In studying suicide, intervention by way of prevention is the bottom line,” she said.

Ivo Foppa, a Swiss-born assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics who joined USC last year, wants to learn more about how West Nile virus is spreading across South Carolina. The state was the last on the Eastern seaboard to see evidence of the virus, which is carried by mosquitoes and birds and sometimes infects humans with deadly results.

“There are a lot of fundamental questions that remain unanswered: what species of mosquitoes and birds are carrying the virus? How does one predict where it will go next, and what areas are suitable for it to flourish?” Foppa said. “The public health community isn’t so worried about West Nile—it is mostly benign in humans—but we’re very interested in other viruses that might be transmitted in similar ways.”

As part of his research, Foppa will work with the state Department of Natural Resources to take blood samples from wild birds to determine if there are species with high levels of West Nile immunity. “Given the recent rainfall, there should be plenty of mosquitoes to test this season—it’s going to be bad for people but good for our research,” he said.

John Zachary, an assistant professor in computer science and engineering who joined USC last year, will use his R&PS award to study ways to make tiny sensing devices more secure in transmitting data. The devices are used by the military for remote surveillance and are gaining widespread attention from industry for energy monitoring and building security applications.

“These sensors are networked to gather acoustic data, seismic information, and optical images, then transmit that information back to a central database,” Zachary said. “The challenge is to make the sensors secure so that only the intended recipient can access the data from the sensor network.”

Zachary’s research is focused on asymmetrical cryptography and could attract funding from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

“The R&PS Award will help me produce security methods and algorithms and convince other funding agencies that I’m working on a problem that is significant and that we have data to solve the problem,” he said. “Intel is funding [the University of California] Berkeley on this; if we have something significant to say, they could fund us, too.”

At USC Spartanburg, English faculty member Tom McConnell plans to use his R&PS award to complete a novel tentatively titled End of Earth, a modern-day cativity narrative. McConnell, who teaches, composition, creative writing, and literature, hopes his novel-writing experience will become a springboard for launching a new course in novel writing next year.

Additional information about the RP&S program can be found at www.spar.research.sc.edu/rpsGuide03.htm.


04/03