Celebrating Scholarship

Robin Belton, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, received a 2026 Promoting Research Opportunities and Open Forums (PROOF) award to support her collaborative research project and summer team meeting at UC Berkeley.

Hadley Bergstrom, Professor of Psychological Science and Director of Neuroscience and Behavior, received a new grant from the National Institutes of Health for his ongoing research project, titled “Differentiating fear generalization and extinction neuronal ensembles in prefrontal cortex.”

Louis Römer, Lecturer in Anthropology, has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Fellowship to complete his book project, Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves. The ethnographic research informing this project was also funded by Wenner-Gren.

Trevor Hyde, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, received the American Mathematical Society’s AMS-Simons Research Enhancement Grant for Primarily Undergraduate Institute (PUI) Faculty for his research in arithmetic dynamics.

Seungsook Moon, Professor of Sociology, and Jihye Seong, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Studies, were awarded a 2026 Seed Program for Korean Studies grant from The Academy of Korean Studies under the Ministry of Education, South Korea, to promote the development of Korean Studies.

In collaboration with two colleagues from Yale University, Zhengren Zhu, Assistant Professor of Economics, received a grant from the Urban Institute’s Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI) for a research study titled Dual Enrollment Courses and Upward Mobility: Which Skills, and for Whom?

Leroy Cooper, Associate Professor of Biology and the Pauline Newman Director of Science, Technology, and Society, received a research grant from NIH for his study titled “Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of smoking behavior with measures of subclinical vascular brain injury and microvascular function,” which will explore how smoking and quitting smoking affect blood vessels and brain health over time.

Maria Hantzopoulos, Professor of Education, Coordinator of Secondary Teacher Education, and Director of International Studies, co-edited the recently published book Partnering for Transformation in Schools and Beyond: Community-Engaged Learning in Peace, Social Justice, and Human Rights Education (Teachers College Press, 2026).

Payton Small, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science, received a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for his study entitled “Investigating the Impact of the 2023 Supreme Court Decision on College Admissions Decisions and Student Identity Disclosure.” His research project will explore the impact of recent Supreme Court rulings on the admissions landscape.