Imaging and Designing Better Separations for Radiochemical Elements

Radiochemical elements have important applications in medicine for imaging and treatment of disease and in energy as nuclear fuel. Critical to these applications is the ability to have pure, reliable sources of radiochemical materials. The desired elements are extremely rare and small quantities must be separated from complex mixtures in mined ores or recycled waste. Currently, purifying these elements is a time- and cost-intensive process. Dated separation methods are typically optimized by a trial-and-error approach, which has led to little technological advancement in the past 50 years. Here, an interdisciplinary effort between Lydia Kisley (Physics) and Christine Duval (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) will develop a new membrane-based technology for purifying radiochemical elements from the bottom up. Using a powerful microscope, we will study the fundamental molecular phenomena that take place during a separation. The understanding of what is happening at small length-and fast time-scales will be used to inform the engineered design of new membranes that can purify elements efficiently. One graduate and one undergraduate students will participate in this exciting research that bridges physics and engineering.

Collaborators:

• Christine Duval, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Democracy and Global Challenges: Understanding democracy’s tangible benefits

Understanding democracy’s tangible benefits is critical at this time when many people have lost faith in this form of governance. Yet, scholars have devoted little attention to these benefits. We address this oversight by asking, what impacts does democracy have on public health and economic outcomes, and which democratic institutions and practices are most effective at achieving positive results in these areas? Answers to these questions are especially important to practitioners and policymakers who work to promote democracy in their own countries and abroad. Our team, including a political scientist, sociologist, epidemiologist, economist, and students from these fields, will conduct statistical analyses using existing global data to examine democracy’s impacts on epidemics and economic inequality, in particular. We will produce scholarly and mainstream publications, host workshops for intergovernmental organizations in order to develop funding partnerships, and advance a Democracy and Global Challenges Institute at CWRU.

Collaborators:

• Brian Gran, Professor, Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences; Law School; and Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
• Roman Sheremeta, Associate Professor, Economics, Weatherhead School of Management
• Daniel Tisch, Associate Professor, Population and Quantitative Health Science, School of Medicine; Director, Master of Public Health Program

Project DRAMA: Using theatrical techniques to Develop Resilience and Anxiety Management in Adolescents

Youth anxiety and depression are common but few adolescents receive treatment due to lack of access to care and the stigma of seeking treatment. Disseminating evidence-based interventions to underserved youth in non-stigmatizing ways is a priority. One way of disseminating evidence-based practices while minimizing stigma is through dramatherapy, the therapeutic use of the arts in the community to promote wellness. Research suggests that there may be social-emotional benefits inherent in the practice

of theater arts, such as improvisational (improv) techniques. Evidence-based therapeutic techniques can be integrated into improv to provide a new way of disseminating treatment to youth. This study will contribute to emerging literature on the psychological benefits of the theater arts by evaluating the impact of improv + Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), one type of evidence-based therapy, in improving youth anxiety, depression, and peer relationships.

Collaborators:

• Christopher Bohan, Instructor, Department of Theater

Translation Practices during the Cold War: A Multidisciplinary Approach

The project involves scholars from different former socialist countries, plus others from the United States, Mexico, Chile and Spain. The main goal is to study -from a multilingual and a multicultural perspective-how translation practices have been and are used as an instrument of ideological manipulation, and the impact that literary translations had in the circulation and consumption of World Literature during the Cold War. Scholars will meet during a three-day symposium to address the importance that literary socialist translation had in reconfiguring a new world literary map during the Cultural Cold War. By interrogating how translation practices are affected by politics and socio-historical contexts, this project will broaden the scope of this field of study and will bring a new and interdisciplinary approach to it.

Collaborators:

• Dr. William Marling, Professor of English and World Literature, CWRU
• Dr. Elliot Posner, Department of Political Sciences, CWRU
• Dr. Cristian Gomez-Olivares, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, CWRU
• Dr. Daria Sinitsyna, Associate Professor, Saint Petersburg State University
• Dr. Emilio Gallardo Saborido, Associate Researcher, Spanish National Research Council.

Interdisciplinary Research at the Interface of Health Science and the Environment (IRIHSE)

The Interdisciplinary Research at the Interface of Health Science and the Environment (IRIHSE) is a multi-school grass roots program led collaboratively by Drs Blanton S. Tolbert (CAS-Chemistry), Karen Abbott (CAS-Biology), Vivien Yee (SOM-Biochemistry), and Bill Yu (CSE-Civil and Environmental Engineering). The program will engage a diverse cohort of undergraduates from historically marginalized groups in a mentored summer research experience on topics relevant to the human health-environment interface. The student experience will include two 5-week rotations in research groups that study biological, biochemical, and environmental systems using approaches that span multiple spatiotemporal scales. The research component will be enhanced through group activities including journal discussions on topics relevant to the social, legal, humanitarian and scientific aspects of the human health-environment interface. We anticipate IRIHSE to become a paradigm to build future scholarly collaborations.

Collaborators:

• Karen Abbott, Professor of Biology
• Vivien Yee, Associate Professor of Biochemistry Xiong (Bill) Yu, Professor and Interim Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Crystals of sound: Using the physics of phase transitions to compose and perform music

The beauty of music arises out of a balance between consonance and dissonance, regular order and variety, predictability and surprise. In nature, similar competitions cause beauty to spontaneously emerge out of randomness when, for example, symmetric snowflakes assemble from randomly colliding water molecules. To understand how these processes occur, we can apply the ideas and mathematical tools of statistical mechanics. In a collaboration between CWRU and the Cleveland Institute of Music, students will explore how the balance between consonance and compositional variety can open a new view onto the structures of music though a series of projects ranging from fundamental physics, to development of technology and computer algorithms for music composition, to new forms of music performance.

Collaborators:

• Alex Cooke, Music theory faculty and Director of Electronic Music, Cleveland Institute of Music, Conservatory and Joint Music Program

Does strain-level variation contribute to microbial response to change in permafrost soil?

Though individual microbes are minuscule, their communities not only constitute the large majority of the biosphere’s genetic diversity but also act as leading drivers of global biogeochemical cycles. We seek to understand how the diversity of the permafrost soil microbiome contributes to its ability to respond to a changing global environment. Microbial metabolism in thawing permafrost will determine how much ancient carbon is released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and how much as methane, a thirty-fold more potent greenhouse gas. As a first step toward understanding how this microbial community’s activity will change as the permafrost continues to thaw, we will model and measure competition among thousands of closely related strains of the soil bacterium Azotobacter vinelandii under a range of growth conditions. In addition, we will build a novel experimental system to capture the evolutionary impacts of soil’s structural heterogeneity.

A new mechanism for species persistence in cities: contemporary, compensatory evolution of recombination rate

Ecosystems currently face threats from many sources, from habitat loss to changing climates. The spread of cities play a central role in these changes by converting natural land and increasing local temperatures through urban heat islands. However, cities, with careful design, may also serve as future refuges for biodiversity. Cities can also be used now to forecast how organisms will respond to future climate change. To use cities in both of these ways, however, we need a deeper understanding of how species respond to urbanization. Currently, almost nothing is known about how cities alter the mechanisms responsible for creating the genetic variation necessary for species to respond to changing environments. We will address this critical gap by exploring how increased urban temperatures affect genetic recombination — a key process for maintaining genetic variation in all sexually reproducing species — using mushroom-feeding flies (Drosophila). This novel study will ideally spur a new frontier of global change research.

The Cleveland Democracy Project: Digital, Civic, and Community Engagement in Cleveland

This innovative community-based course will model a new pedagogical practice at CWRU while also developing a collaborative digital resource that can be used by students, faculty, and community residents. Partnering with Know Your Neighbor, Cleveland Votes, and ThirdSpace Action Lab, this course will introduce CWRU students to the diverse social fabric of Cleveland through community-based research and civic dialogues. In the process, they will collaboratively develop and contribute to “The Cleveland Democracy Project,” a digital mapping and archival resource that focuses on the history and culture of place, with an emphasis on marginalized voices and civic organizing. The course will enhance not only student learning by engaging them with the history and culture of Cleveland but also provide an avenue for community input into research and education.

Collaborators:

• Jennifer Lumpkin, Civic Engagement Strategy Mangager, Cleveland Votes
• Delaney Jones, Campaign Founder, Know Your Neighbor

Pressing Matters: Printmaking, Self-Advocacy, and Community Activism in East Cleveland

Pressing Matters will design and facilitate participatory printmaking, visual literacy, and self-advocacy projects for under-resourced youth groups in East Cleveland and the Clark-Fulton neighborhoods. Partnering with area non-profit Zygote Press and the Cleveland Institute of Art, our project will result in the creation of an interdisciplinary consortium of CWRU faculty and students, CIA faculty and students, and community partners. Prints offer relatively inexpensive, widely disseminated access to information, ideas, and images. The history of printmaking has in turn been a history of revolution and of racial and social identity formation. With the advent of digital technologies, however, printmaking has become difficult to access—most high schools and many colleges (including CWRU) do not own presses. Providing access to this medium is but one facet of our initiative. Through the unification of scholarship, teaching, and community engagement, Pressing Matters will create dialogues with and open communicative pathways for under-resourced populations in greater Cleveland.

Collaborators:

• Stephen Ciampaglia, Champney Family Professor of Art, CIA and CWRU Department of Art History and Art

Image Permissions and Photography for The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones

Roja Babel: geopolíticas de la traducción socialista Cuba y el bloque del Este (1960-1990)

Casta State of Mind: Michael Menchaca and the Graphic Revolution of Caste

Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder: How the Mind’s Original Joy Is Revolutionary