Twenty-nine faculty/graduate student research teams have received funding in the latest round of the Research Partnership Program.
The program, which began in 1987, is supported by the Office of the Dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs.
Applications are reviewed by a 14-member faculty panel that includes representatives from biological and health sciences, physical sciences and engineering, social science and education, and the humanities and the arts. The average funding of one project is $25,000.
Research topics and faculty/graduate teams by research area are:
Biological and Health Sciences
Christin Carter-Su, professor of physiology, and Anthony King (molecular physiology) will study the ability of cellular signaling molecules to induce transcription through the v-src element to obtain information on v-src signaling pathways leading to alteration of gene expression.
John C. Mitani, assistant professor of anthropology, and John W. Pepper (biology) will investigate the vocal behavior of the glossy black cockatoo, a wild parrot species in Australia. The goal is to fill a gap in knowledge of vocal communication and learning in non-human animals by providing the first detailed study of the natural communication system of one of the most vocally prolific birds.
Ronald A. Nussbaum, professor of zoology and curator and director of the Edwin S. George Reserve, and Sheng-Hai Wu (biology) will study the evolutionary relationships of the microhylid frogs of Madagascar, testing hypotheses concerning the geographical distribution of microhylids and other groups in relation to continental drift and provide a better understanding of the biodiversity of the diminishing rain forests of Madagascar.
Geneva M. Omann, associate professor of surgery and assistant professor of biological chemistry, and Michael A. Model (biophysics) will address important questions in cell biology regarding the relationship of ligand-receptor binding and cell responses by applying a non-linear mathematical modeling approach to understand the kinetics of chemoattrac-tant-induced responses and the turn-off of those responses.
Mark A. Saper, assistant professor of biological chemistry and assistant research scientist, Biophysics Research Division, Institute for Science and Technology (IST), and Thomas R. Transue (biological chemistry) seek to understand how amaranthin, a lectin from the plant Amaranthus, can distinguish tumor cells from normal cells. Amaranthin tightly binds T-antigen disaccharide, a carbohydrate exposed on the surface of rapidly proliferating human cells, including those found in colon cancer.
Gerald R. Smith, professor of zoology and of geology and mineralogy and curator of fishes, Museum of Zoology, and William Paul Patterson (geological sciences) will examine seasonality of climates of the past several thousand years in the Great Lakes area using the isotopic composition of fossil materials, testing the hypothesis that seasonality, not mean annual temperature, is the primary climatic determinant of regional biodiversity.
Andrew E. Yale, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and K.R. Raghavan (electrical engineering) will work on a project to develop a medical procedure to detect tissue lesions deep in the body, such as in the human breast, without resorting to mammography.
Erik R. P. Zuiderweg, professor of biological chemistry and research scientist in the Biophysics Research Division, IST, and Robert C. Morshauser (biological chemistry) will work to determine the three-dimensional structure of a molecular chaperone using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Chaperones are protein molecules essential to intracellular protein folding processes.
Physical Sciences and Engineering
David W. Gidley, associate professor of physics, and Eileen Yu (biophysics) will investigate the biological applications of the positron microscope.
Gerald J. Keeler, assistant professor of environmental and industrial health, and Joseph R. Graney (geological sciences) will trace the source, transport and accumulation of toxic metals within the Great Lakes region. An understanding of the past and present sources, transport and accumulation of toxic metals such as lead will be important in the design of effective control strategies.
C. Teresa Lam, assistant professor of industrial and operations engineering, and Shih-Ching Sang (industrial and operations engineering) will model and analyze circular measurements from the Coordinate Measuring Machine at the CMM Laboratory of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. They will apply statistical techniques to characterize circular measurements based on the collected data.
Elke A. Rundensteiner, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Lei Zhou (computer science engineering) will design and develop a scientific database to address needs of the Human Genome Project, supporting the efforts of geneticists by automating data management and other routine but labor-intensive tasks.
Louis J. Soslowsky, assistant professor of surgery and adjunct assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and David M. Malicky (mechanical engineering and biomechanics) will develop a mathematical model of the shoulder that will provide insights into the stability contributions and load sharing of the various joint components, such as muscles and ligaments, to improve understanding of how to stabilize dislocated shoulders.
Albert F. Yee, professor of materials science and engineering and macromolecular science and engineering, David J. Srolovitz, professor of materials science, and Liu Yang (materials science and engineering) will model the structure and relaxation behavior of glassy polymers.
Social Sciences and Education
Linda Blum, assistant professor of sociology and of women’s studies, and Theresa Deussen (sociology) will employ qualitative data to examine the social construction of the “good mother” in the face of economic restructuring and cultural ambivalence about gender norms in light of changes in the work and family experiences of American women.
Nancy E. Burns, assistant professor of political science and assistant research scientist, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research (ISR), and Glenn Beamer (political science) will examine the extent to which the institutions of American state politics enable or constrain African-American representation in policy outcomes.
Hemalata C. Dandekar, professor of urban and regional planning, and Kameshwari Pothukuchi (urban, technological and environmental planning) will examine the strategies that migrant women adopt to obtain housing for themselves; women’s special needs for housing; the opportunities that attaining shelter provides them; and the economic, social and institutional constraints women face in their attempts to house themselves.
Geoffrey H. Eley, professor of history, and Becky E. Conekin (history) will compare the changing representations of the national past in the cinemas of Britain and Germany between the 1960s and the present. The immediate context is provided by the extreme public conflicts around how the national past is to be remembered in the two countries during the 1980s.
Sandra Graham-Bermann, assistant professor of clinical psychology, and Alytia Levendosky (clinical psychology)
will study the parenting of battered mothers to determine how and in what ways good parenting can act as a mediating factor for children in homes of domestic violence.
M. Kent Jennings, professor of political science, and research scientist, ISR, and Ellen Ann Andersen (political science) will investigate the impact of a critical life event, being personally affected by AIDS, on individual political orientations and political mobilization as represented by a national gathering of AIDS activists.
Donald R. Kinder, professor of political science and of psychology, and Lisa D’Ambrosio (political science) will examine the question of democratic competence by looking at the claim that Americans arrive at their views in a systematic fashion, one that is governed by processes of social identification, and that public opinion reflects the web of allegiances and antipathies that Americans develop toward social groups.
Jersey Liang, professor of health services management and policy, and research scientist, Institute of Gerontology, and Naoko Muramatsu (health services organization and policy) will examine the interplay between social relationships and physical health in the Japanese elderly using nationally representative panel data collected in 1987 and 1990. The direct and indirect effects of social relationships on physical health will be evaluated; special attention will be directed to the measurement specifications of social relationships and physical health.
Martin S. Pernick, professor of history, and Peter Laipson (cultural history) will examine the construction of bachelorhood as an aspect of the medicalization of private life in America and as seen in the major mediator of early 20th-century mass culture, motion pictures.
Ronald G. Suny, the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History, and Lynda Yoon-Sun Park (anthropology and history) will look at Soviet nationality policy in Transcaucasia and Central Asia to determine the role of the Soviet state in the formation of modern nations and the development of nationalism in these regions.
Humanities and the Arts
Jane R. Burbank, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, and Mary Wells Cavender (history) will research the role of gender in the formation of the legal profession in late imperial Russia by examining Russian legal journals, memoirs and newspapers from 1900 to 1917.
Anne R. Gere, professor of English and of education, and Sarah Robbins (English and education) plan to produce two manuscripts, one that deals with the cross-class projects of women’s clubs at the turn of the century and another that explores the material and social circumstances involved in producing and consuming club yearbooks.
Diane M. Kirkpatrick, professor and chair of the Department of History of Art, and Linda Duvall (art) will conduct research for Kirkpatrick’s ongoing “Art as Information” writing project. The work also will enable Duvall to investigate the art historical and theoretical context for her own art and to prepare an essay on her findings.
Michael Makin, associate professor of Slavic languages and literature, and Timothy J. Kiely (Slavic languages and literature) will produce a detailed survey of publications of and on the poet Nikolai Klyuev from 1985 to the present, including Klyuev’s unfinished magnum opus, which was confiscated during the poet’s lifetime and was released from the KGB archive in 1991. Klyuev was executed in 1937.
Glenn E. Watkins, the Earl V. Moore Professor of Music, and Jeffrey Lyman (bassoon performance) will test one of the most identifiable and yet least frequently discussed aspects of Stravinsky’s music: voicing and articulation. Reviewing Stravinsky’s devotion to the authority of the past, the art of Couperin, Bach and Webern will be reappraised as it impacted on his Russian heritage.
