Brian Evans

Assistant Professor of Dance

Congratulations to Brian Evans, who was recently awarded a project grant from the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation! Project grants are awarded directly to Maine artists to engage in bold, compelling, risk taking work, valuing unconventional approaches to art making, critical dialogue, collaboration and new models of community interface. These individual grants are applied for and managed directly by the recipient without flowing through Bates.

Dr. Evans’s project is entitled Busking for Reparations and seeks to create a framework to empower performers and engage audiences across multiple venues to consider and continue the ongoing conversation regarding reparations for American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS). The award will support research, staging, performances in the Lewiston/Auburn and Portland areas, and post-performance Dream Storming sessions with the audience community. All events will be archived to be submitted to the Maine State Archives.

Congratulations, Brian, and we look forward to attending a performance of your work!

Mollie Woodworth

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience

New Neuroscience faculty member Mollie Woodworth has been awarded a three year R00 career development grant from the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to support to development of her research program at Bates. Dr. Woodworth studies how neuronal diversity arises during the development of the retina and applies these insights to regenerative strategies, with a focus on retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the output projection neurons of the retina. RGCs are a critically important retinal neuron type, and because the adult mammalian retina has minimal to no regenerative capability, irreversible visual impairment results from RGC injury (in traumatic optic nerve injury) or death (in glaucoma, optic neuropathies, and other eye diseases). Dr. Woodworth’s research into the mechanisms that control generation of RGCs during development will help motivate and inform treatment strategies for retinal damage based on RGC regeneration and/or repair.

This award is part of the NIH’s K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award program, which supports the transition of investigators from mentored postdoctoral to independent researcher positions. Congratulations, Mollie!

Martin Kruse

Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience

Congratulations to Martin Kruse, who has been awarded a three year grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to support his research. Dr. Kruse will study a novel role for a recently discovered protein, IRBIT, in regulation of two critical signaling pathways, phosphoinositide signaling and release of calcium from intracellular calcium stores. These pathways function in almost every cell in the body and are dysregulated in several neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Dr. Kruse’s work to develop a better understanding of the regulation of these pathways by IRBIT will contribute to the possibility for new and better treatments for these and other pathological conditions.

This award is part of the NIH’s R15 Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) for Undergraduate-Focused Institutions program, which has goals of exposing undergraduate students to research and strengthening the research environment of undergraduate institutions. Dr. Kruse will oversee academic year and summer research by students at Bates as part of this project.

Holly Ewing

Professor of Environmental Studies and Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies

Congratulations to Holly Ewing, who has been awarded a $25,000 contract with the Lewiston/Auburn Water District to continue her long-running project to monitor the water quality of Lake Auburn, the source of drinking water for the Lewiston/Auburn area. Dr. Ewing, along with her students, monitor the density of Gloeotrichia echinulata and levels of nutrients, temperature, oxygen, and pH, among other factors, to inform the management of the lake and its surroundings.

Paula Schlax

Stella James Sims Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Paula Schlax and collaborators at Indiana University School of Medicine have been awarded a grant from the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study the “Regulatory Network of the Lyme Disease Pathogen“. This project builds on Dr. Schlax’s extensive expertise in characterizing the effects of RNA binding proteins on post-transcriptional gene regulation in B. burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Dr. Schlax and her collaborators will study a regulatory pathway that controls the movement of the bacteria out of ticks and into mammals, improving our understanding of the B. burgdorferi life cycle and potentially identifying strategies for disrupting this process and preventing Lyme disease infections. Congratulations, Paula!

Jeff Oishi

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Congratulations to Jeff Oishi, who along with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently awarded a grant from NASA to support continued development and deployment of Dedalus, a flexible, open-source, parallelized computational framework for solving general partial differential equations using spectral methods (Phys. Rev. Research 2, 023068, 2020).

Carolina Gonzalez Valencia

Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture

Carolina Gonzalez Valencia has been awarded a new grant from the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund to support post-production work on her film “How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps.” In this project, Beatriz Valencia, a domestic worker in the U.S. and Carolina, her daughter-filmmaker, collaborate to create the fictional character of a writer. Together, mother and daughter capture the slippage between truth and lies, in a hybrid documentary that tells a story about immigration, labor, dreams and the power of fiction to spark emancipation. Congratulations, Carolina!

Beverly Johnson

Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences

Congratulations to Bev Johnson, who recently received funding from the Maine Coast Heritage Trust to support a summer research fellow. Dr. Johnson and her student will measure carbon stocks and sequestration and sedimentation on the Webhannet Marsh, in Wells Maine, and in Harrington Maine.

Shoshona Currier

Director, Bates Dance Festival

Congratulations to Shoni Currier, who has received two recent awards from the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. These awards will support performances and classes by Betsy Miller during the 2023 Bates Dance Festival and by Kimberly Bartosik during the 2024 Festival.

Caitlin Cleaver

Director, Bates-Morse Mtn. Conservation Area & Coastal Center at Shortridge

Dr. Cleaver has been awarded a grant from the Davis Conservation Foundation for work with the Basin Oyster Project, a community-based project that supports oyster farming in Maine as a means to improve coastal resilience in the face of climate change. This award supports efforts to continue building an oyster reef in an inlet off the New Meadows River by seeding farmed oysters onto the reef, to monitor the success of the reef building efforts, and the host a workshop and other outreach activities to share lessons learned with community members and others interested in conversation.

Geneva Laurita

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Dr. Laurita was recently awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development) award to support her project “Confluence of magnetic and electric dipoles on the pyrochlore lattice“. This 5 year long project will study the chemistry, structure, and resulting functionality of materials that may serve as alternatives to lead-based components of electronic devices. In addition to involving Bates undergraduate students researchers on the project, Dr. Laurita will host graduate students from other institutions for 2 month internships. Graduate students will be introduced to the research and teaching environment at a primarily undergraduate institution and will serve as mentors to undergraduate research students in Dr. Laurita’s laboratory. Read more…

Caitlin Cleaver and Beverly Johnson

Director, Bates-Morse Mtn. Conservation Area & Coastal Center at Shortridge (CC) and Professor of Earth and Climates Sciences (BJ)

Dr. Cleaver and Dr. Johnson were recently awarded funding from the Maine Community Foundation to support their project “Expanding Capacity for Salt Marsh Restoration and Carbon Sequestration in Maine”. For this project, Dr. Cleaver and Dr. Johnson collaborate with a group of salt marsh restoration experts to create a local field team for small-scale marsh restoration in the Kennebec River Valley and Casco Bay watersheds.  They will monitor the impacts of the restoration methods on sedimentation, surface elevation, surface hydrology, and carbon cycling in the Sprague River Marsh and predict that the restoration practices will increase the functionality of salt marshes and enhance carbon sequestration in these areas.

Aleks Diamond-Stanic

Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy

Dr. Diamond-Stanic has received recent funding from the Space Telescope Science Institute to support his project “What Lies Beneath: Understanding the Hidden Engines Driving Extreme Outflows and Galaxy Quenching“. This is a 3 year long NASA funded collaborative proposal between Bates and researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The team will use data generated from the James Webb Space Telescope to help answer the question: What are the galaxies dust-corrected star formation rates?