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Understanding the Dynamic Connections Among Stewardship, Land Cover, and Ecosystem Services in New York City's Urban Forest

This project will integrate recent advances into an interdisciplinary human ecosystem framework to advance understanding of urban social and ecological systems, focusing specifically on the dynamic factors that cross social and ecological boundaries. The project will test hypotheses regarding the relationships between actions of managers and stewards who maintain the urban forest in New York City, the ecological processes that govern its abundance, diversity and suitability as habitat, and a key societal service it provides, temperature regulation of the urban microclimate.

Education Production and Peer Networks Among Out-of-School Children in India

The PI proposes investigating the education production function in the context of an informal community based model of instruction targeted at out-of-school children in India. Using the planned expansion of the program, the PI will conduct a three part randomization that will allow us to distinguish the effects of student, teacher, classmate, and non-class peers on student achievement while also generally evaluating the effectiveness of community based class model. The evaluation design comprises three randomizations.

Measuring Ethnic and Regional Group Differences

Ethnically heterogeneous societies are widely held to be more difficult to govern than homogeneous ones. Theoretical arguments often attribute the problems to the fact that ethnic divisions result in divergent group preferences. However, the core measure in empirical research on the problems with heterogeneous societies is ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF), which contains no information about the likelihood of particular groups holding divergent preferences.

Collaborative Research: Primary Elections for U.S. State and Federal Offices: A Comprehensive Database and Analysis

The emergence of the primary election process during the 20th Century is widely thought to have transformed American politics. For example, primary elections allegedly weakened political parties and fueled the rise of personalistic, incumbency oriented politics; and primary elections are though to have made politicians much more ideologically extreme than the electorate as a whole, because candidates must first win approval of a partisan subset of the electorate before they can even qualify for the general election.

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Participation in Loyalist Protest Activities in Northern Ireland

Cultural protest actions are used by political actors around the world to achieve political objectives, but existing political science theories cannot fully explain their dynamics. In particular, the current literature does not account for why individuals participate in actions that have significant political consequences but that do not offer material inducements for participants or social punishments for non-participants. The aim of this dissertation is understand who chooses to participate in politically-relevant protest actions and why.

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Law and Social Sciences: Accountability in Multiple Fora After Extreme Mass Behavior

The second half of the 20th century saw a shift from an international system in which acts of mass extreme behavior were considered unpunishable to one in which they are generally viewed as criminally culpable conduct. When events become public, the states where they occur are now beset by calls to either prosecute those responsible or allow an international court to do so.

Strengthening Qualitative Research Through Methodological Innovation and Integration: Networks of Expertise and the Autism Spectrum

The number of autism spectrum disorders diagnoses in the U.S. has risen exponentially over the last 10 years. Why has this happened? This research project begins from the sense that the search for explanation has up till now been impeded by an untenable opposition between biological (therefore "real") and social (therefore "artificial") causes.

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Science of Science and Innovation Policy: From Cycles to Spirals: Structural Analysis of Scientific Consensus Formation

The project develops a new strategy to explain and measure scientific consensus formation. It develops a quantitative measure of scientific consensus, based on an analysis of the structure of scientific citation networks. The measure is validated by exploiting changing consensus levels across time regarding several scientific propositions, such as "smoking causes cancer", "Human activity causes a climate change", etc.

Doctoral Dissertation Research: New Therapies and the Multiplication of Disease Diagnoses

Between 1950 and 1990 cancer research underwent a radical transformation. Drug screening programs in the 1950s tested single compounds on multiple cancers in heterogeneous patient samples. Yet in the decades that followed the first chemotherapy trials, researchers turned to studies of narrow subcategories of cancer (e.g. metastatic breast cancer in postmenopausal women) to test complex therapies involving surgery, radiotherapy and drug combinations.

Science of Science - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants

The Science of Science: Discovery, Communication, and Impact (SOS:DCI) program is designed to understand the scientific research enterprise and increase the public value of scientific activity. The program pursues this goal by supporting basic research in three fundamental areas:

How to increase the rate of socially beneficial discovery;
How to improve science communication outcomes; and
How to expand the societal benefits of scientific activity.

Deadline: 

Friday, September 9, 2022
Friday, February 10, 2023

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