Race, Equity, Resilience, and Social Justice Research at
Emory University
The SVPR Research Council, made up of the associate deans of research from Emory’s ten schools and units, identified Race, Equity, Resilience, and Social Justice as one of three research themes that span schools, units, and centers across Emory.
The year 2020 further uncovered our nationwide weaknesses in this area, with unjust killings and months of racial justice protests followed by a global pandemic that exposed sweeping inequities. These events have brought the Race, Equity, Resilience, and Social Justice theme into even sharper relief, galvanizing members of the Emory community and reminding us that we need to do more, and to do it now.
Emory is working internally, as faculty, staff, and students called for the university to become a more just and inclusive place. Members of the Emory community have shared their experiences of racism and injustice, asserting the need for meaningful action that makes Emory a truly equitable university. The action steps laid out by President Gregory L. Fenves last semester are moving forward in exciting and potentially transformative ways.
Through our research enterprise, this work is also external. Many of Emory’s brightest minds continue to conduct research and make discoveries that challenge societal assumptions about race, equity, resilience, and social justice. In these extraordinary times, Emory faculty are living out the university’s mission, creating, preserving, teaching, and applying knowledge in the service of humanity—with particular attention to the lived experiences of minority and underserved communities.
The research our faculty are conducting touches all parts of Emory, crossing disciplines and traditional academic siloes.
Faculty are breaking new ground in understanding race and resilience, applying their skills and training to the study of history, business, medicine, media studies, religion, and much more.
In what follows, we introduce five members of Emory’s faculty engaged in race, equity, and resilience research, some of whom are fairly new to our university. These individuals are leading with excellence, boldly staking new ground as they raise important new questions—and as they search for answers that make a tangible difference.
The SVPR office is committed to supporting race, equity, resilience, and social justice research across Emory in collaboration with the Provost’s office and Deans. How can we promote and inspire your involvement in this area? Read on to learn more about how you can get involved.
Erika Hall, PhD
Assistant Professor of Organization and Management Goizueta Business School
When insurrectionists attacked the Capitol on January 6, Erika Hall sat glued to the news like everyone else. But in the minutes and hours after the attack, while most of us retreated in shock to our respective corners, Hall got to work.
Together with Ella F. Washington from Georgetown University and Allison Hall Birch from the University of Texas, Arlington, Hall penned an article for Harvard Business Review, “How to Talk with Your Team About the Violence at the U.S. Capitol.” Published on January 7, the op-ed piece urged employers to resist the tendency—often born of discomfort—to clam up at the office and say little or nothing about the Capitol riot to employees and team members.
“When something unspeakable occurs,” Hall and her colleagues wrote, “you won’t find the perfect words to calm your people and restore their focus. No one does. But it important that you acknowledge pain when it is felt. It is top of mind for your employees, and they are waiting to hear from you.”
As a social psychologist and organizational behavioralist, Hall conducts research on racial biases and stereotyping in the workplace and broader society. She is deeply engaged in current events, applying her expertise and mixed-methods research to understanding the latest headlines, often as they’re unfolding. “My research is constantly evolving,” she says. “I’m driven by current issues. If it’s in the news, I will dissect it.”
Hall broke new ground in 2015 when she and colleagues published a paper in The Journal of Experimental Psychology which found that white people view “African Americans” more favorably than “Blacks.”
In four studies, Hall and her colleagues discovered that research participants routinely believed a person possessed a higher level of education and employment status if that person was referred to as African American rather than Black. If the subject was described as African American, 73% of study participants concluded that this person must be a manager. If the same person was described as Black, only 38% of participants concluded the same. Hall and her colleagues further found that subjects referred to as African American were imagined to be wealthier, more competent, and to possess a “warmer” or sunnier disposition than subjects referred to as Black—clear indications of bias. But what assumptions lay beneath these different perspectives?
While her 2015 paper showed that racial perceptions change based on the label assigned to a minoritized person, Hall’s current research shows why that perception changes. Racial label imprinting serves as the driving factor, she argues. The term “African American” gained prominence within the late U.S. civil rights movement, while the term “Black” was popularized within the Black Power movement. Over the years, each term was appealed to repeatedly within its distinct context.
“When words are co-located in that way,” Hall says, “they start to pick up the meanings of the movements they gained prominence within.” Her research shows how references to “Black” and to “African American” today still retain associations with the historical movements in which they were born. When either term becomes applied to a particular person or group, those historical connections, together with their emotional and psychological underpinnings, become stirred up and applied to the person under discussion.
Dr. Erika Hall
Dr. Erika Hall
As part of this research, Hall conducted an experiment. She labeled one theoretical group an “African-American union” and another a “Black union,” and she asked research participants what those unions would most likely campaign to accomplish. Respondents were significantly more likely to say that the Black union wanted to defund the police than they were to say the same about the African American union. “The words we choose,” Hall says, “have consequences beyond anything we originally thought.”
And those consequences can be life changing. After Hall published a study showing that criminal suspects are perceived more negatively when labeled as Blacks as opposed to African Americans, an inmate at a New York correctional facility wrote Hall a letter, asking her for more information about her research and its implications for helping his own situation. That letter, Hall recalls, was one of the most important moments in her career to date. It reminded her of why the work matters.
She’s excited to be doing this work in Atlanta, the birthplace of the civil rights movement and an amazingly diverse metropolitan area. “You see a hunger among people for race research here,” Hall says. “It’s top of mind for many people in our city.” Atlanta helps inform her questions—and serves as a continuous reminder of the struggle for justice and equity.
Lauren McCullough, PhD, MSPH Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Rollins School of Public Health
Most molecular epidemiologists look beneath the skin to investigate causes of cancer. But Lauren McCullough looks above the skin, as well, integrating biological and genetic factors with those drivers that cannot be put under a microscope—environment, cultural differences, and experiences of racism and redlining.
McCullough, who received the Brian MacMahon Early Career Epidemiologist Award from the Society for Epidemiologic Research in 2019, studies breast cancer and lymphoma in low-income and minoritized populations. Her research integrates ‘below the skin’ investigations, including epigenetics, molecular epidemiology, and other biomarkers for disease risk and progression, with ‘above the skin’ factors: behavioral, environmental, and reproductive epidemiology, as well as disparities research. She is especially interested in breast cancer outcomes for Black women.
American Cancer Society data has shown that Black women have higher breast cancer death rates, higher incidence rates under age 40, and a higher likelihood of dying from breast cancer at any age than White women. The situation is even worse in Atlanta.
“Black women in Atlanta are twice as likely to die of breast cancer as their White counterparts. Nationally, the excess death is closer to 40%. What’s going on in our backyard?”
McCullough’s preliminary studies, funded by Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute, the V Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, have shown that disparities in breast cancer outcomes persist well beyond the explanations often cited, namely health insurance availability and access to care. She found that Black women with health insurance still faired much worse than their White counterparts when it came to disease outcomes. Interestingly, the race disparities among women without insurance were much less robust. “A Black woman who lives in a high socioeconomic neighborhood is still twice as likely to die from breast cancer as a White woman living in the same neighborhood,” she says. “That surprises a lot of people, because they think if a woman has health insurance and access to care, she should be seeing the same results. But she’s not. We still haven’t answered the question.”
Digging deeper, McCullough began to look at the social determinants of breast cancer. The complex trauma that racism inflicts on Black women—daily and unending stressors ranging from implicit bias to blatant discrimination and violence—could be having a cumulative impact, affecting Black women’s health beneath the skin in ways we have yet to understand.
McCullough has just received a large R01 from the National Institutes of Health to explore these and other potential contributors to Black women’s breast cancer outcomes. The grant will allow her to expand her research from Atlanta throughout the state of Georgia, as she and her team examine disparities by race, socioeconomic status, and urban/rural divides. In Georgia, the sources of breast cancer outcome disparities remain unresolved. It is quite likely that they arise from the intersection of contributing and causal factors at all levels, “from cell to society,” McCullough says.
This is the first proposal of its kind to study the rates and risks and rates of breast cancer recurrence (an intermediate point between the initial diagnosis and potential mortality event) by demographic characteristics. It’s also the first to take seriously questions of intersectionality in these outcomes and to use a multilevel decomposition approach to identify potential targets for intervention. McCullough’s team will look at data from approximately 30,000 women diagnosed with a first primary stage (I-IIIA) breast cancer in Georgia between 2013 and 2017. The overriding goal is to identify those contributing factors that can be modified or targeted within a given at-risk community—and to recommend interventions that prolong and save lives, both now and in generations to come.
McCullough works closely with oncologists at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute as she conducts her studies. Clinical investigators are eager to partner with her public health team. “We have all unified around this question of disparate outcomes in breast cancer,” she says. “Everyone recognizes that these are complex problems that demand complex solutions.” She is grateful for the stellar master’s and doctoral students who engage in this work alongside her; to date, she has mentored more than 20 students in the field. Her students bring momentum and spark new ideas, even as the team understands that finding answers is an ongoing battle. “Every analysis leads to new questions, many revolving around systemic barriers and experiences of discrimination that are largely missing from the literature,” McCullough says. “We have to acknowledge how race and inequity affect Black women. We won’t begin to narrow the gaps in breast cancer mortality without this recognition.”
Map of historical redlining in Atlanta (1938)
Map of historical redlining in Atlanta (1938)
Distribution of redlining in the metropolitan Atlanta area; index modeled using adaptive spatial filters (2010–2014). Published in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention (2020)
Distribution of redlining in the metropolitan Atlanta area; index modeled using adaptive spatial filters (2010–2014). Published in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention (2020)
Chris Suh, PhD
Assistant Professor of History
Emory College of Arts and Sciences
When someone tells Chris Suh that history repeats itself, he replies—not necessarily.
“The past only repeats itself if you choose to see it that way,” he says. And it’s the historian’s job to help uncover those surprises or variations in the archival record that challenge conventional assumptions.
Suh specializes in the United States’ engagement with the Pacific World and in Asian migration to the United States. His current book project, based on his 2019 dissertation at Stanford University, examines the writings and actions of self-proclaimed American progressives during the early twentieth century. He explores how leaders known for their commitment to social programs and workers’ rights wound up articulating some of the most racist and xenophobic views of their time—an attitude that strikes us, today, as inconsistent with their reformist platform. Southern progressives instituted strict segregation codes in the South. Western progressives, especially in northern California, provoked virulent anti-Asian immigration sentiment. Yet both southern and western reformers saw themselves as crusaders on behalf of the poor and vulnerable. “Racism,” Suh says, “is more complicated than we want to think.”
In The Allure of Empire: Race and Reform in the Imperial Transpacific, Suh examines the connections between imperial politics and domestic race relations to understand how leading figures in the early twentieth century saw racial subjugation and exclusion as, ironically, “progressive.” What was it about imperialism that attracted so many reform-minded leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt? Suh argues that key shapers of reformist thought saw exclusionist and imperialist practices as “progressive” because they permitted “selective inclusion,” or the welcoming of certain Asians into imperial governance of the Pacific—namely, those elite few who had been deemed sufficiently Western and “civilized.” From this perspective, imperialism offered an opportunity for minoritized races to join the ranks of the civilized powers, thereby claiming a better life. This outlook, of course, ignored the reality on the ground for vast numbers of Asians and for Asian immigrants to the United States. “The progressive commitment to protecting the vulnerable,” Suh says, “did not include working-class Asian immigrants.”
Yun Ch’i-ho
Yun Ch’i-ho
Yun Ch’i-ho
Yun Ch’i-ho
Suh’s inspiration for this research project began in graduate school, when he encountered the diary of Yun Ch’i-ho, the first international student at Emory (class of 1893). Although Yun is well known among Korean historians, less is known about him in the United States. A Korean educated in the Jim Crow South, Yun quickly came to understand how certain theories of race helped maintain various forms of inequality, including the imperial order in the Pacific. By retrieving the observations of Yun and other Asians, including Asian immigrants, Suh eloquently portrays the complicated dilemma they faced: cooperation with American imperialists and exclusionists created a pathway to achieving upward social mobility, but it did so at a moral and reputational cost.
Suh drew from his early training in English literature and American studies as he wrote his book, weaving political history into a textual analysis of the language and rhetoric of Progressive Era speeches and writings. As a bilingual scholar in English and Korean, he also investigated the language choices made by Asian American and American-educated Asians who wrote about cooperation and empire during this period. These individuals, he observes, deliberately wrote in English to make their ideas legible and appealing to their American counterparts.
Suh’s passion for his subject matter has found its way into the undergraduate classroom. Last fall, he and his students undertook a collaborative project researching Asian and Asian American students across Emory’s history. They pored over archival documents online and at the Rose Library, uncovering some surprising insights about Emory’s early years, including how favorably Warren Candler, Emory’s tenth president and a man known for his conservatism, viewed Asian students, and how much he did to support their matriculation.
"I’m excited to be doing this research in the South—and to be doing it within an international context, with students from all backgrounds participating."
Challenging conventional wisdoms isn’t for the faint of heart: he admits that his research sometimes draws fire from both ends of the political spectrum. But that means he’s doing his job. Bridging gaps between the past and the present is as necessary—and as complicated—as bridging present-day divides between the political left and right. We need the full story, and a recognition that history never really repeats itself, for true racial justice and equity to move forward.
Nichole Phillips, MDiv, PhD
Associate Professor in the Practice of Sociology of Religion and Culture
Director of the Black Church Studies Program
Candler School of Theology
Nichole Phillips is interested in science. She’s interested in religion. She’s especially interested in their intersection. Those moments where faith and medicine collide tell us something about what it means to be American. And those same moments cannot be fully understood without including race in the conversation.
Trained in sociology and religion, Phillips is leading a new study of the relationship between science and religion in Black congregations. “Black Faith, Bodies, and Mother Mortality,” a $100,000 grant awarded by Rice University and UCSD and funded through the Templeton Religion Trust, will examine the convergence of science and religion in three Black churches identified with the “greater black church tradition” in Atlanta. As she conducts interviews with congregation members, Phillips will draw on the sociology of memory—specifically, cultural memory studies—to explore how scientific beliefs and attitudes shape religious identity and vice versa. She will also look at attitudes towards Black women’s high death rates during and post-childbirth, as well as Black infant mortality, both major public health crises. How do these complex and ongoing social traumas—mother mortality and the loss of a newborn child—inform Black congregation members’ perceptions of, and relationship to, science and modern medicine?
While scholars have long explored the broad exchange between religious beliefs and scientific ideas, most studies have prioritized conservative, largely White, Protestantism. Missing from this equation are in-depth examinations of Black Protestants and Catholics—including identification of the specific medical or scientific issues that keep members of these communities up at night worrying.
“There’s a huge gap. The literature on Black religious practitioners—meaning the greater Black church, including Black Catholics—is missing from most religion-science discussions today.”
Phillips, who also serves as associate faculty in Emory College’s Department of Sociology, is in the early stages of launching her congregational study, which is one of 17 funded by Templeton worldwide with the aim of contributing new knowledge to the sociology of science and religion. “This is not just a project about how Black people think about science and medicine,” she says. “It’s about the intersection between religion, science, and medicine. And in many respects, the perceptions and ideas held by Black religious practitioners are, I would argue, a microcosm of the wider Black community.”
Though the Templeton grant is new, Phillips’s fascination with religion and science is not. In college, she was a biochemistry major and a religion minor. She planned on pursuing medical school but decided to pursue a Master of Divinity degree first; she wanted a theological grounding for her medical practice. Her long-term plans changed, and the academic study of religion beckoned. But she never abandoned her love of science. She sees the fields as cognate disciplines. Keeping one foot in each world enables her to ask why both religion and science have become so politicized in twenty-first century America—and what difference race makes to this equation.
Phillips’s 2018 book, Religion Black and White: The Color of American Exceptionalism, analyzed American post 9/11 national identity by way of a small, racially mixed community in rural west Tennessee. As she engaged with this community, Phillips came to understand that White Americans and Black Americans start from similar ideals or principles but wind up with very different understandings of what it means to be American. These differences stem from the embodied public theologies embraced by each group. In a post-9/11 America, she argues, traditional notions of civil religion cannot accommodate the exploding diversity of real-life experiences. As a result, Americans retreat to their respective corners, unable to communicate in the ways we once might have done. And the corners to which we have retreated are racially drawn.
Phillips adds that what we saw on January 6 with the attack on the U.S. Capitol was not American civil religion, which she sees as aiming for inclusion, even though it falls short. What we saw was Christian nationalism, she says. “Christian nationalism is not meant to unify and include. But it’s essential to recognize that it exists as a tradition with its own history and theological foundation. It is part of America. We have to recognize what it is and where it comes from, or ‘healing the divide,’ as people say, will never have a chance.”
Phillips’s scholarship has also catapulted her into public health conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic. She is frequently asked to comment on the pandemic’s impact on Black communities and people of faith. How Black congregations view COVID-19 vaccination is closely linked, she says, to their complicated historical experiences of exploitation and marginalization within American science and medicine. Trust is an issue, she says, and trust within a faith-based setting needs to be better understood. We must dig deeper into the question of how faith-based communities shape and in some cases lead this conversation.
When she’s not researching or in the classroom, Phillips serves as Consultant/Science Advisor for the Science in Seminaries Project, created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a collaborative effort poised to bring new insight into scientific understandings of faith in the twenty-first century. Contributing to these nationwide efforts is her way of giving back where she can. She wants to support the congregations and communities that have done so much good in the world, she says, even as these communities also remind us that the work of the Gospel remains unfinished. “We have to get better,” she says. “We have to strive for greater understanding.”
Dr. Nichole Phillips
Dr. Nichole Phillips
Jessica Stewart, PhD
Assistant Professor, African American Studies, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
Graduate Faculty, Department of Sociology
Before she became a political scientist, Jessica Stewart spent two years at the Mayo Clinic as a health systems administrative fellow. As she mastered the operational demands of helping lead a major medical enterprise, she met patients facing life-threatening illnesses. The stories they told left her with a lasting appreciation for timely translational research.
“I believe in bench to bedside,” she says. “And not just for the health sciences. We need that sense of urgency in the social sciences, too. The issues are just as pressing.”
Now in her second year as an Emory faculty member, Stewart is interested in how racial, spatial, and economic factors influence public opinion. She’s writing a book that examines how geography and economic restructuring influence American racial progress in the post-Civil Rights era. Her work challenges conventional notions of racial progress, asking what that phrase means and to whom. How do we define and measure it? She argues that attitudes toward racial progress have become geographically differentiated because of profound labor market shifts over the past three decades—shifts that facilitated what some call a “Great Divergence” of American cities along economic and educational lines. These attitudinal variations crop up between minoritized communities and Whites, but they are also intra-racial. Stewart pays particular attention to internal tensions and differences in perception that arise within Black communities.
"Intragroup conflict interests me. It’s less talked about. We think that if we talk about our differences, we’ll be airing our laundry in public. But I want to find out what people think!"
She gives the example of two Black women living in different neighborhoods. Even if both individuals are middle class, a Black woman living on the south side of Chicago will probably view the state of racial progress differently than a Black woman living in the heart of Buckhead will view it. What they see outside their windows shapes their perceptions, Stewart argues: local conditions continuously inform our sense of place, opportunity, and justice—or the lack thereof.
“When they’re driving to work, or when they’re walking around the neighborhood, these women are seeing different worlds,” Stewart says. “Those observations shape their perceptions of how far we still have to go.”
For Stewart, this research isn’t just translational. She grew up on Chicago’s south side, losing her brother to gun violence in 2002. She understands what it’s like to live in a neighborhood burdened by decades of systemic inequality. “You can find success coming from one of those places,” she says, “but then when you look around, you’re reminded that you’re an anomaly.” She sometimes wonders why so many people assume that the South is more racist than the North or the Midwest. If that’s the case, she asks, why are so many Black people leaving New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia and moving back to their roots—Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte? “Place is important,” she says. “A sense of place is playing into this migration story.”
Although her research spans geographical regions, Stewart is, at heart, a localist. With colleagues from the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland, she recently completed a study that asked how the quality of local neighborhood amenities affects political participation. What do local communities think about their police department, their parks and libraries? And how does the quality of these amenities lead to variations or differences in resident views?
An even larger project recently received the green light to move forward. Together with Emory faculty members Vanessa Siddle Walker and Janeria Easley, Stewart will participate in a $5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Led by the University of Michigan, with a number of universities participating, “Crafting Democratic Futures: Situating Colleges and Universities in Community-Based Reparations Solutions” will invite local organizations to engage with universities in a collaborative public history project. The study is designed to generate ideas for community-based reparations based on conditions and needs within local neighborhoods.
Stewart is excited about this local yet scalable work. “What do communities in Atlanta think about what equity looks like?” she asks. “Reparations is a big idea—what would that truly look like, locally?” Project participants aim to create local partnership models for other universities to follow.
Stewart’s commitment to research that operates locally without losing sight of the big picture means that she is out in the community regularly, building relationships and forging ties with her neighbors. She’s thrilled to be one of four Black political scientists on the faculty at Emory—an institutional cohort whose work she strongly believes in.
“This isn’t just about publications,” she says. “The research we do needs to reach people. I want people to know that there are scholars out there devoting their lives to creating knowledge that makes a difference for them.” She pauses. “That can be empowering for marginalized communities – to know that they are not alone. To know that someone is out there, working for them.”
Constructive Collisions
Dr. Kimberly Eck joined the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research in August 2020 as Associate Vice President for Research at Emory University. As part of our research leadership team, she helps develop and implement university-wide strategies to advance the research enterprise at Emory. Her role includes facilitating “constructive collisions” among researchers, creative encounters that bring new ideas, methods, and practices into scholarly exchange. She also looks to proactively pair faculty with funding opportunities that reflect the SVPR cross-cutting research priorities.
On January 19, Eck facilitated a meeting with more than 50 faculty members to discuss funding challenges and opportunities within Race, Equity, Resilience, and Social Justice research. She asked participants two questions: How can the SVPR office support scholars leading Emory forward in this area? And what does success look like for your own research efforts?
Eck is energized to work with Emory’s faculty. “The faculty at Emory are remarkable,” Eck says. “Their sincere commitment to advancing their scholarship and using it to improve the lives of people across the globe is incredible.” Previously, she served as the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research Development at the University of Tennessee, where she led the research development functions, providing proposal development support, facilitating faculty collaborations and partnerships, and offering programs to help faculty be successful scholars. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP) and as President of NORDP for 2020-2021. Eck earned her PhD in Epidemiology at SUNY University at Albany, her MPH in Epidemiology and Behavioral Science at Saint Louis University, and her BA in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. To connect with her, please email her at keck@emory.edu.
Dr. Kimberly Eck
Dr. Kimberly Eck
Grant Opportunities
Please see below for a list of grant funders and upcoming grant opportunities related to race, equity, resilience, and social justice the research theme highlighted in this inaugural newsletter issue. Future newsletters will provide funding information and opportunities in other research areas.
If you would like to find a collaborator at Emory for one of these grant opportunities, please contact Kimberly Eck in the SVPR office at keck@emory.edu. For all other questions, please reach out to the SVPR office at svpr@emory.edu.
Major Foundation Funders
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and we believe that everyone deserves beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we are working to help broaden the discussion about what shapes health and set a new standard of health, equity, and well-being for all communities.
W. K. Kellogg Foundation
Kellogg grantmaking supports thriving children, working families, and equitable communities.
- Thriving Children: We support a healthy start and quality learning experiences for all children.
- Working Families: We invest in efforts to help families obtain stable, high-quality jobs.
- Equitable Communities: We want all communities to be vibrant, engaged, and equitable.
Upcoming Foundation Opportunities
Andrew W. Mellow Foundation
2021 John E. Sawyer Seminars on the Comparative Study of Cultures
The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars program provides support for collaborative research on historical and contemporary topics of major scholarly significance. The seminars bring together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields—mainly, but not exclusively, in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences—for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. The maximum grant award for each Sawyer Seminar is $225,000. Only one submission is allowed for Emory University; thus, we are holding a limited opportunity competition.
Interested applicants should submit the following items by 5 pm on March 17, 2021, in order to be considered for this competition.
- An executive summary (1-page description of proposed work)
- The rationale for raising the central questions to be addressed and the potential significance of the inquiry to be pursued (max 2 pages)
- A general budget and budget narrative (1-page max)
- Short CVs (1-2 pages) for the principal seminar organizers
Contact: Kristin Anderson, Office of Foundation Relations (kristin.anderson@emory.edu)
Partnership for Southern Equity
Rolling Deadline: Jan 2021 - December 2023 Increase transparency, accountability, community engagement, and job opportunities related to economic development policies and practices through the development of technology-based platforms, public finance research, leadership development, and the deployment of a local hiring and training program
Federal Funding Agencies
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Grant announcements from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for supporting research to improve the quality, effectiveness, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness of health care.
Grants.Gov
This central website can be used to search and apply for grants administered by the federal government. Alondra Nelson was announced as OSTP ‘Science and Society’ Deputy. President Biden has chosen sociologist Alondra Nelson as OSTP’s deputy director for science and society, a new role that reflects the priority he and Vice President Kamala Harris are placing on issues such as social and economic equity and environmental justice. As an expert on the intersections of genetics, race, and health, Nelson is currently president of the Social Science Research Council and a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This new position signals an increased federal focus on race, social justice, and related concepts at the federal level.
Upcoming Federal Opportunities
National Science Foundation
The Law & Science Program considers proposals that address social scientific studies of law and law-like systems of rules, as well as studies of how science and technology are applied in legal contexts. The Program is inherently interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. Successful proposals describe research that advances scientific theory and understanding of the connections between human behavior and law, legal institutions, or legal processes; or the interactions of law and basic sciences, including biology, computer and information sciences, STEM education, engineering, geosciences, and math and physical sciences. Scientific studies of law often approach law as dynamic, interacting with multiple arenas, and with the participation of multiple actors. The deadline is Aug 2, 2021.
National Science Foundation
The Human Networks and Data Science program (HNDS) supports research that enhances understanding of human behavior and how humans interact with and are influenced by their environments by leveraging data science and network science research across a broad range of topics. HNDS research will identify ways in which dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous data can provide novel answers to fundamental questions about individual and group behavior. HNDS is especially interested in proposals that provide data-rich insights about human networks to support improved health, prosperity, and security. The deadline is February 3, 2022.
National Endowment for the Humanities
The NEH Collaborative Research is due December 1, 2021. Debate, exchange of ideas, and working together—all are basic activities that advance humanities knowledge and foster rich scholarship that would not be possible by researchers working on their own. The Collaborative Research program aims to advance humanistic knowledge through sustained collaboration between two or more scholars. Collaborators may be drawn from a single institution or several institutions across the United States; up to half of the collaborators may be based outside of the U.S. The program encourages projects that propose diverse approaches to topics, incorporate multiple points of view and explore new avenues of inquiry in the humanities.
About this Story:
Written by Stacia Pelletier. Designed by Jenna Heaton. Produced by Clara Riddick and the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research at Emory University.
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