Featured Awards – September 2015

Yasemin Besen-Cassino (Sociology, CHSS) received $15,000 from Sociologists for Women in Society to support the operation of the Book Review Office of Gender & Society at Montclair State University. Gender & Society is ranked #1 journal in the area of gender studies. This grant will provide yearly funding, extendable up to three years, for operational costs of the office. As a part of this grant, Dr. Besen-Cassino will be serving as the book review editor of Gender & Society for the second year of a three-year term, selecting books for review, selecting reviewers, editing book reviews, and preparing book reviews for publication. This grant also provides funding for a Montclair State graduate student to serve as an office assistant.

‌‌The Spencer Foundation awarded $1,000,000 to Katrina Bulkley (Counseling and Educational Leadership, CEHS) for “The New ‘One Best System?’: Urban Governance and Educational Practice in the Portfolio Management Model.” This study will examine ties between Portfolio Management Model infrastructure and practices of system-level actors, educational management organizations, schools, and intermediate outcomes linked with student learning.

Mark Chopping (Earth and Environmental Studies, CSAM) was awarded $13, 491–the first year of a three-year, $148,357 grant from NASA–to conduct the research project titled “Changes in Shrub Abundance in Arctic Tundra from the Satellite High Resolution Record for the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment and Impacts on Albedo”. The project is part of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE; http://above.nasa.gov), a large-scale NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program study of environmental change in the region and its implications for social-ecological systems. The first year funding will support project set-up, with the remainder in the second and third years going mainly towards graduate student support. The project will use semi-automated interpretation of high resolution satellite imagery to assess the direction and magnitude of changes in shrub cover and aboveground biomass in Alaskan and Canadian Arctic tundra over a 10- to 15-year period. This will provide data that can be used to validate lower spatial resolution ABoVE remote sensing data products; initiate, drive, calibrate and validate ecological models; and assess the impacts of these changes on tundra summer albedo.

The US Department of Education awarded Jennifer Goeke (Curriculum & Teaching, CEHS) $295,736 for “Restructuring Preservice Preparation for Innovative Special Education (RePPrISE) – Year 5.” The purpose of this project is to restructure the University’s existing post-baccalaureate MAT Dual Certification program to prepare middle and secondary educators through three interdisciplinary strands of teacher preparation: Inclusive pedagogy; Intensive content area preparation in mathematics or science; and Integrative STEM (iSTEM) education.

Emily Isaacs (Associate Dean, CHSS) and Willard Gingerich (Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs) received a $20,000 subcontract from the United Student Aid Funds-funded Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities for “Developing and Using Adaptive Courseware for English Composition Instruction at Public Research Universities.” The University will provide Dr. Isaacs and three supporting faculty to participate on this project. Together they will work with faculty from three other U.S. universities to develop a composition course that takes advantage of learning technologies that allow for individual learner personalization and adaptation.

Donna Lorenzo (Health Careers Program, CSAM) received $250,000 from the US Department of Education for the fifth year of “Upward Bound.” This five-year project has total award of $1,250,000. The Upward Bound Project provides a six-week commuter summer session followed by an academic component comprised of 25 Saturday sessions. Emphasis is placed on identifying eligible students who are low income and first generation.  The project seeks to improve students’ academic proficiencies in all subject areas and in the state’s standardized instrument, the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA) to enable graduation from high school. The Project’s curriculum is comprised of mathematics through calculus, laboratory sciences, foreign languages, language arts, SAT Review, and HSPA Review Courses in Language Arts and Mathematics. The services provided are academic tutoring, advice and assistance in secondary and post-secondary course selection, assistance in preparing for college, assistance in completing financial aid applications, general assistance in alternative education programs for secondary school dropouts, general assistance in entry into post-secondary education, and education and counseling services to improve financial and economic literacy.

Bryan Murdock (Center for Community Engagement) was awarded $468,240 by the US Department of Education for the second year of a $2.5 million grant for “City of Orange Proposal to the U.S. Department of Education: University Assisted Full Service Community Schools Program.” This program will allow Montclair State to work closely with the Orange Public School District to convert two low-performing Title I schools into University-Assisted Full-Service Community Schools.
Mr. Murdock and Danielle Dapiran (Center for Community Engagement) also received $1,000 from the New Jersey Commission on National and Community Service for “National Day of Service – 2015” for costs associated with engaging the Montclair State campus community with various community-based organizations within the extended area of Montclair.

The National Institutes of Health awarded $138,200 to Stephanie Silvera for the fourth year of ”Exploring Sociodemographic and Behavioral Factors Underlying Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Cancer Prevention Behaviors in New Jersey.” These disparities are explained, in part, by unequal access to cancer screening across socioeconomic and racial groups. These findings will serve to examine the complex interaction between socioeconomic status and health behaviors, and how they differ between non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic White, and Hispanics in New Jersey, which has one of the highest cancer rates in the nation.