PI: Katharina Galor  Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies

The proposed research and publication build on a planned exhibition featuring children’s drawings from across Israel-Palestine (developed in coordination with a group of Brown students in this seminar Israel-Palestine: Public Humanities MES1051). The first exhibition venue will be New York’s Central Synagogue in August 2025. The show will display digital images of children’s drawings from a range of communities in Israel-Palestine. These include Israeli, and Palestinian populations—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Bedouin—within Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The planned research, fieldwork, and publication, which I will conduct in collaboration with art therapist Amani Moussa, will explore the drawings within their larger cultural, historical, and geopolitical context. Our respective fields of study on Israeli and Palestinian societies draw from contemporary art history, anthropology, gender studies, and child psychology. Here, we focus on how different communities—particularly children as primary victims of the ongoing conflict and war—are experiencing the recent and continuing upheavals in their lives. The exhibition, research, and publication will be the first comparative cross-border study on the impact of the current humanitarian crisis, highlighting children and their drawings across cultural, religious, national, and political divides.

PI: Becci Davis Lecturer in Visual Art

Unpolished Legacies Online is a digital resource that supports instruction about Rhode Island’s Indigenous, botanical, industrial, and post-industrial heritage using Mashapaug Park as a focal point and springboard for study. Students and teachers of art, history, and science need relevant curricula on Rhode Island’s rich cultural and natural histories. With this award, my collaborator Holly Ewald and I will complete the development of a website that centers artwork and content gathered during our 2019 interdisciplinary project, Unpolished Legacies. This educational site offers resources to support place-based science, social studies, and art instruction in Rhode Island’s middle and high schools. One of the richest sites for multidisciplinary learning about the arc of this country’s history can be found at Mashapaug Pond, where the once world-renowned Gorham Silver Manufacturing Company stood. Multidisciplinary and placed-based study can make learning more engaging and relevant by encouraging students to make connections between multiple academic subjects and the immediate world around them. The purpose of this project is to connect students and educators with local artists, history, flora and fauna, as well as, to provide easily accessible content to share different perspectives on the impact of the Gorham Silver Manufacturing Company on Rhode Island, the nation, and the world. 

PI: Helina Metaferia Assistant Professor of Visual Art

“We Must Be Magic” is an interdisciplinary art project that investigates how bodies can become sites for restorative justice through artistic practices. Focusing on the embodied revolutionary legacies of Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) women (cisgender, transgender, gender non-conforming), this project takes form as mixed media collages, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. The project draws its inspiration from Ethiopian talisman “healing scroll” paintings from my own ancestral heritage, juxtaposed with grassroots community organizing practices, for which applied together become ways to conjure relief from the ails of modern systemic oppression. This new body of work serves as a springboard from, and sequel to, my last body of work, “By Way of Revolution,” which foregrounds the often overlooked labor of BIPOC femme activists in archives of social justice movements. In this latest iteration, the archives of protest are replaced with mark-making traditions from Ethiopian talisman motifs, providing a modern day twist to an ancient art historical practice.  The funding from this project will directly support the research and materials for several of my national and international exhibitions featuring this new body of work, during the 2025-2026 year. Envisioned as a multi-year project, the seed funding from this grant will create impact in my practice for years to come. 

PI: Ieva Jusionyte Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology

“Extradition: Can Justice be Exported?” examines extraditions from Mexico to the United States - as legal, political, and social processes - to understand the impact this practice has on justice: Do extraditions aid it or impede it? In the past two decades, more than a thousand Mexicans have been extradited to the United States to face charges of drug trafficking and money laundering conspiracies. The crimes they committed in Mexico - extortion, kidnapping, disappearance, and murder of Mexican citizens – are not investigated by US courts. This means that communities which experience the most direct effects of violent crime and gross human rights violations in Mexico are left without access to truth and accountability. The widespread practice of prosecuting Mexican citizens involved in organized crime in the United States is a highly politicized and obscure process, which brings up questions about the rule of law and the meaning of justice on two sides of the border. Drawing on legal and archival research, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges involved in extradition cases in the United States and in Mexico, former and current Mexican and US government officials, Mexican citizens who have been extradited to the United States, and family members of crime victims in Mexico who are seeking truth and accountability, the project will investigate the immediate as well as the long-lasting consequences that extraditions have had on the Mexican society and its criminal justice system. 

PI: Bonnie Honig Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science (for the Democracy Project)

This project will study the politics of design with a view to redesigning our politics. An interdisciplinary working group drawn from several universities and departments, including political science and the social sciences, the humanities, art theory and practice, architecture, and history, will consider how a design perspective might help develop new approaches to divisive political issues and practices. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, we will meet on Zoom 3-4 times in Fall 2025 to discuss existing literatures on democracy and design. In early 2026, we meet with local design-build experts or with the Vermont Yestermorrow School of design to ask: what might a design-build approach to democracy look like? Questions for an academic conference at Brown, early in April 2026, might include: (i) Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park (NYC) , which aimed to show that democracies could be lavish. But the project displaced Black and Chinese residents of Seneca Park. Can we be lavish again, but better? (ii) we might ask how to redesign public bathrooms so they do not postulate the conventional gender binary, thus loosening the grip of the “bathroom debates.”  (iii) gerrymandering involves design and aesthetic judgments are used to assess newly drawn districts; does “beauty” belong here?  (iv) neighborhood garden design might be a focus, too: which designs bring in new people? Does care for shared objects move communities to welcome new members? In sum, we ask: how might a focus on “design” and/or aesthetics promote egalitarian and inclusive practices of democracy? This intense, extended collaboration will, we hope, generate ideas and practices well-designed to meet the moment.

PI: Lisa DiCarlo Senior Lecturer in Sociology

This project will attempt to map the linguistic inventory of a neighborhood of İstanbul that has evolved over time from indigenous ethnoreligious minorities, namely,  Greek, Armenian and Jewish, to newcomer communities, specifically Nigerian, Moroccan and Syrian.  Elmadağ today is home to both heritage and newcomer communities. More fluid establishments, such as restaurants, barber shops and convenience stores, indicate the presence of newcomer communities, while the more fixed institutions, such as Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, a synagogue and the Vatican consulate, reference populations that are now a minority in the neighborhood. There are two public elementary schools in Elmadağ that are struggling to accommodate the influx of newcomer children. While Turkey has been a receiving country for migrants and refugees for more than 30 years, there is no formalized policy in Turkish public education for accommodating students who do not speak Turkish. There are also no language classes offered for adult learners of Turkish.  A linguistic inventory of the neighborhood will help elucidate potential unmet needs as well as reveal the current demographic makeup of a neighborhood that is once again in transition. This project will be undertaken in conjunction with partners from the Göç Araştırma Merkezi (GAR), the migration research group at Galatasaray University, where I have an affiliation during my scholarly leave for the second semester of 2024-2025.

PI: Anita Shukla Elaine I. Savage Professor of Engineering, Professor of Engineering

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) are highly susceptible to bacterial biofilm formation. Current treatments including a combination of wound debridement and antibiotics are limited in their efficacy due to the recalcitrance of biofilm bacteria. These bacteria exhibit a range of antibiotic resistance mechanisms, including the production of β-lactamase enzymes (βLs), which deactivate β-lactam antibiotics, which are among the most common antibiotics prescribed for treatment of wound infections. Here, we will develop a βL-responsive microneedle patch, which will exhibit a dual approach to treating bacterial biofilms by physically disrupting the bacterial biofilm and releasing antibacterial therapeutics locally in response to βLs. This proposed device can limit the need for additional therapeutic interventions and lower the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. This research will result in a viable product that will be ready for pre-clinical testing in murine models to evaluate the efficacy of the βL-responsive microneedle patch. Data obtained through this proposal will enable successful acquisition of external funding to advance this research. A long-term goal stemming from this initial effort will be to either license out this technology or begin a start-up company geared toward translating this device to market. This proposed device would advance Brown’s position in the field of biomaterials for drug delivery, specifically for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant microbial infections, which is a significant global health threat.  

PI: Peter Belenky  Associate Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology

Antibiotic treatment failure remains a major clinical challenge, often driven by undetected variation in how individual bacteria respond to drugs. These differences, shaped by each cell’s metabolic state, are hidden by traditional bulk transcriptomic methods. In this study, we will test the feasibility of applying single-cell transcriptomics to track antibiotic responses in individual bacteria grown under controlled, metabolically diverse in vitro conditions. By adapting a streamlined enrichment step to an existing single-cell sequencing method, we will investigate how defined environmental factors—such as carbon source and redox state—affect bacterial susceptibility. These in vitro systems are intentionally designed to model real-world metabolic heterogeneity while avoiding the complexity of host or microbiome environments. The ultimate goal is to identify conditions that either homogenize bacterial susceptibility (enhancing drug effectiveness) or promote protective diversity (preserving beneficial bacteria). This project fills a key technical gap by providing essential proof-of-concept data to support single-cell analyses in complex bacterial populations. It will also strengthen the foundation for future external funding opportunities, including the resubmission of an R21 and the renewal of an upcoming R01. Beyond this project, the single-cell platform developed here will support a wide range of microbiological research at Brown, enabling deeper insights into microbial behavior under stress and during treatment.

PI: Elyse Couch  Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice

In the past decade, several new biomarkers for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are now reimbursed by Medicare. These biomarkers can enable an earlier and more accurate diagnosis of AD and identify patients eligible for a new class of disease-modifying therapies, anti-amyloid monoclonal antibodies. Together, these changes promise to transform care for millions of beneficiaries with dementia. For example, previous research from our team has found that a diagnosis of AD based on biomarkers can provide patients and their care partners with useful information on what to expect in the future. However, we also identified significant barriers to accessing AD biomarkers and there are concerns that issues relating to their cost, comfort, and accuracy will potentially exacerbate existing health disparities. The proposed study aims to characterize the utilization of AD biomarker tests in the first 9 years of their coverage by Medicare (2013-2022) and to identify beneficiary-level predictors of receiving an AD biomarker test, with focus on identifying potential disparities. This project will provide timely information on the real-world use of AD biomarkers, which has yet to be investigated. The findings from this proposal provide crucial preliminary data for a future R01 proposal, build on our existing work investigating the implications of using AD biomarkers in routine clinical practice, and reinforce Brown’s position as a leader in this field.