Reves Announces 2019 Faculty Fellows
The Reves Center for International Studies has awarded four professors Reves Faculty Fellowships for research in 2019. The Reves Center’s 2019 Faculty Fellows are: Mary Fabrizio (Professor, Marine Science at VIMS), Shantá Hinton (Associate Professor, Biology), Philip Roessler (Associate Professor, Government) and Andrew Ward (Lecturer, Classical Studies).
Each year a committee of faculty and Reves staff awards Reves Faculty Fellowships to support faculty-student research and collaboration on internationally-focused, engaged scholarship. The initiative is open to full-time William & Mary faculty in all academic units. Proposals are invited from faculty with significant experience in the international arena as well as those seeking to expand the focus of their work to include international, global, and/or trans-national approaches.
The 2019 projects are:
Mary Fabrizio, VIMS Fisheries Science, “Do National Parks in Nepal Effectively Conserve Biodiversity of Fishes?”
Many nations have established national parks and protected areas to aid in the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems and the species that rely on them, but it is not clear if protected areas contribute to the conservation of aquatic ecosystems and their freshwater fish fauna. Together with colleagues and students from the US and Nepal, I propose to study the impact of protected areas and the effect of the proximity to population centers on fish taxonomic and functional diversity in major rivers in western Nepal. In addition to studying taxonomic and functional diversity, we propose to examine fish population size structure as an indicator of potential harvesting pressure, as well as the overall health of individual fish using fish condition indices.
Shantá Hinton, Biology, “Characterizing MK-STYX domain's role in cellular specialization”
There are external and environmental factors such as extreme heat, UV irradiation or hypoxia that stress cells. Fortunately, cells have protective mechanisms such as the formation of stress granules (SG), large cytoplasmic RNA-protein complexes. They are transient and disassemble when cells are no longer stressed, but if they remain too long, they become toxic, possibly resulting in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. A student-faculty team with examine SG through an international research collaboration at the Lunenfeld-Tatenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, ON.
Philip Roessler, Government, “Mobile Agricultural Insurance and Resiliency to Climate Change: A Pilot Study and New Research Program”
This project—in close collaboration with a team of W&M students who won the Global Research Institute’s Shark Tank competition in fall of 2018—seeks to better understand how, if at all, mobile agricultural insurance can strengthen farmers’ resiliency from climate change and reduce their vulnerability. This project builds on ongoing research on mobile technology and digital equality. A Reves Faculty Fellowship will support travel to Kenya in summer 2018 to work with the W&M Shark Team to undertake a pilot study of mobile agricultural insurance and show proof of concept; and support grant-writing to scale the mobile agricultural insurance program and directly test its impact on climate change resiliency.
Andrew Ward, Classical Studies, “William and Mary at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace”
The Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the north shore of the Aegean island of Samothrace was famous in antiquity for its mystery cult. The meteoric rise of the Sanctuary in the late 4th to 2nd centuries BCE saw the construction of some of the most architectural adventurous buildings of the Hellenistic period, and the dedication of the famed Winged Victory now in the Louvre. A new five-year research initiative seeks to understand key issues of phenomenology and access long overlooked. William & Mary students will participate in the 2019 excavation season and learn fundamentals of archaeological investigation, following up in Williamsburg with data processing and synthesis.
Previous Reves Faculty Fellows and their projects are listed online.
