$740,000 Awarded to 13 Faculty in Research Growth Awards

The Saint Louis University Research Institute will award more than $740,000 in grants in its second round of funding to accelerate research growth at the University.

Launched in September 2018 through the largest gift received in the history of SLU, given generously by Dr. Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield, the SLU Research Institute furthers SLU’s goal of becoming the world’s leading Jesuit research university.

13 Proposals Funded

The Research Institute invited SLU faculty to submit proposals that would propel SLU’s research forward. Over 70 proposals were submitted, and 13 were selected to receive funding from the Research Growth Fund.

This is the second round of grants to be awarded through the Research Growth Fund. The first round of grant recipients was announced in January. Fifteen faculty members were awarded a total of $1.8 million.

The Research Growth Fund is designed to be a flexible source of funding for faculty across the University to help achieve their research and scholarship ambitions and make progress towards the goals of the Research Institute .

More information on the process and the grant recipients from the first round can be found here.

Funded Projects at a Glance

Among the 13 faculty and projects funded through this second round are:

• Miriam Cherry, J.D., professor and co-director in the William C. Wefel Center for Employment Law in the School of Law, who will study recently-developed methods of online justice that are new in methods and aims, and that have sometimes led to controversial results. These include amateur sleuths gathering online to collect clues in cold cases, workers sharing information online about abusive labor practices, and users writing negative Yelp reviews when they hear a business has treated a customer poorly. It also includes more aggressive tactics, such as using the Internet to dox people and mount harassment campaigns. Do these activities move from activism to “digilantism”? Cherry will tackle these issues and more in a new book manuscript.
•  Terra Edwards, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, who will finish work on a book manuscript titled “Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language.” Edwards’s research is grounded in more than a decade of anthropological engagement with DeafBlind communities, and focuses specifically on the “protactile movement,” which advances the radical claim that hearing and vision are not necessary for things like greeting another person, joining or leaving a conversation, observing others, or being with them in silence. Protactile leaders argue that all human activity can be realized via touch. “Going Tactile” draws on 30 months of anthropological fieldwork and analyses of interactional and linguistic data, and tells the story of what Edwards learned about language and life as the people she knew, their modes of knowledge, and their forms of communication were, as they said, “going tactile.”
• David Ford, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry & molecular biology and director of the Center for Cardiovascular Research in the School of Medicine, who will use new, innovative technology to investigate endothelial and epithelial barrier dysfunction. Many diseases are either initiated or escalated due to loss of barrier function. The capacity to measure changes in barrier function is critical to evaluate the relevance of mechanisms of diseases investigated by SLU researchers. This new technology will improve research infrastructure at SLU, and will be used by a number of researchers in a variety of departments, including the investigators planning for a SLU Sepsis Center and the SLU Institute for Drug and Biotherapeutic Innovation.

Get more information on SLU’s Research Growth Institute and see a full listing of awarded projects