Fourteen faculty from the College of Letters and Science were recently selected to have their research supported by the college’s Regeneration Research Program. The program is designed to help faculty fill gaps created by the current constrained funding environment. Grant awards range from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on proposed needs and budget justification.
The awardees were selected by the college’s Research Support Committee.
Learn more about the faculty members and their research projects:
Alyssa Griffin
Assistant Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Assessing the Full Blue Carbon Potential of Tropical Seagrass Meadows in Moorea, French Polynesia
The tropical Indo-Pacific region contains approximately half of the world’s seagrass meadows, highlighting the substantial climate mitigation potential of these ecosystems. In Moorea, French Polynesia, there is an abundance of research on the island’s coral reef ecosystems, but very little research has been conducted on local seagrass meadows despite the fact that tropical seagrass meadows and coral reefs often function as interconnected marine habitats. Griffin will conduct the first comprehensive assessment of seagrass blue carbon storage potential in Moorea in collaboration with local community members and leaders.
Grace Wang
Associate Professor, American Studies
Instrumental: The Elayne Jones Story
A collaboration between Wang and documentary filmmaker Julie Forrest Wyman, Instrumental: The Elayne Jones Story is a forty-minute documentary about musician Elayne Jones, an African American percussionist, political activist, and self-described “stealth bomber” who broke racial and gender barriers in Western classical music. The project is intended to generate public conversation in and beyond the world of Western classical music.
Jesús M. Velázquez
Associate Professor, Chemistry
Urban Mining for the Energy Transition: Reactive Capture of CO2 and Rare Earth Streams via Oxalate Chelation
Rare earth element separations remain among the most chemically intensive processes in materials manufacturing, relying on solvent extraction trains that often require 10 to 100 stages to achieve high purity. Velázquez and colleagues aim to replace multistage rare-earth separations with a chemistry-driven approach in which carbon dioxide is converted into ligands that directly program selectivity in materials recovery, enabling the simultaneous production of rare-earth oxides and graphitic carbon from waste streams.
Chijun Sun
Assistant Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Kuroshio Current Dynamics and Impacts Under Past and Future Warming
Located in the Northwest Pacific, the Kuroshio Current is a western boundary current that plays an important role in hemispheric heat distribution, mid-latitude climate variability and biodiversity. Due to its high bio-productivity, the Kuroshio region also functions as a major global carbon sink. To better understand the impacts of future warming on the Kuroshio Current and its dynamics, Sun and colleagues will use legacy ocean sediment core data, among other tools, to help reconstruct how the current was impacted by past warm intervals during the late Cenozoic.
Jaroslav Trnka
Professor, Physics and Astronomy
All-loop Scattering from the Amplituhedron
To describe the quantum realm, physicists rely on quantum field theory and experiments with particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider to predict and reveal how elementary particles behave. Results from scattering experiments use mathematical functions called scattering amplitudes to illuminate all possible interactions between particles in a simplified way. Trnka’s project “All-loop Scattering from the Amplituhedron” will focus on the computation of a four-point scattering amplitude of gluons — particles that hold together protons and neutrons and are responsible for nuclear reactions — to all orders.
Elisa White
Associate Professor, African American and African Studies
African Migration and Blackness in Europe
The grant will support White’s book project that utilizes field notes and visual media that reflect on earlier periods of her research and publications on African diaspora communities of Dublin, Ireland emerging in the early 2000s. White has conducted extensive fieldwork related to human rights stakeholders and migrants, grassroots organizers, immigrant organizations, activist events, and informal entrepreneurial projects, as well as media and policy analyses in key locations of Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, Cádiz, Tarifa, and Ceuta. The grant will also support White’s travel and participation in 32nd Annual Council of Europeanists conference, which will be held in June 2026 at University College Dublin.
Liza Grandia
Professor, Native American Studies
Tracking Transgenes in the Maya Lowlands
Maize is Mesoamerica’s staple crop, with high agricultural, economic, social, nutritional, and cultural importance that is shared among Maya communities in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. To complement a laboratory project with biologists from the Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco (UAM-X) to test native maizes for the presence of transgenes on both sides of the Mexican/Guatemalan border, Grandia will lead a qualitative process to document commercial corn markets, whether legal or illicit, in Guatemala to help explain, predict and ideally prevent the rapid extra-legal spread of genetically modified corn in Guatemala that puts Maya farmers at risk for being criminalized for ancestral seed saving.
Michiko Suzuki
Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Rewriting the Canon: Japanese Feminist Literature in the 21st Century
Suzuki will use the grant to continue work on the first scholarly book in any language to discuss 21st century works by Japanese women writers that rewrite canonical texts or genres from a feminist perspective. The purpose of this project is to address the lack of studies of Japanese women writers publishing today. According to Suzuki, there have been no significant discussions of writing that can be called feminist adaptations, highlighting the need for a valuable scholarly contribution that addresses contemporary literature, feminism and literary adaptation
Louise Berben
Professor, Chemistry
Toward Catalysis Mediated by Aluminum Complexes
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust at 8%, can be domestically sourced and is infinitely recyclable where necessary. Berben’s research group is developing aluminum alternatives to precious metal catalysts, developing the alternatives with methods that follow green energy principles and generate minimal side products. The group’s goal is to develop a sufficient understanding of the aluminum chemistry to control the elementary bond-making and breaking steps, so that new catalytic processes can be delivered.
Akshita Sivakumar
Assistant Professor, Design
The Design of Weatherization: Sociotechnical Approaches for a Just Energy Transition
Sivakumar’s research project aims to analyze contradictions that show up in California’s decarbonization efforts. While the state has the most ambitious building decarbonization policies in the country, it has some of the most energy-burdened, marginalized communities, such as farmworkers and “home performance” workers who upgrade buildings through weatherization efforts. Sivakumar will analyze energy reductions and building weatherization practices that often involve the installation of heat pumps and zero-emission cooling, sealing and insulating.
Najwa Mayer
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies
Supply Chains of Terror: War, Labor, and Art in the 21st Century
Mayer’s first book project, tentatively titled Supply Chains of Terror: War, Labor, and Art in the 21st Century, traces the transcontinental supply chains of the Global War on Terror by investigating the entwined pathways of weapons, art, and displaced migrant labor in war markets. interdisciplinary manuscript uses military archives, artworks, and oral histories with migrant artists to examine supply chains not only as economic infrastructures but as historical evidence of militarized systems that reorganize human displacement, environmental ecologies, and cultural production across global routes.
Lishan AZ
Associate Professor, Cinema & Digital Media
CUTOUT Short Narrative Film
CUTOUT is a short narrative film about two estranged sisters longing to reconnect. Lem Lem and Nessanet were once inseparable but had a falling out after a series of conflicts that began when Nessanet developed paranoid schizophrenia in her senior year of high school. Years later, Lemi returns home hoping to reconnect. The film grapples with themes of isolation, grief, and the taboo associated with mental illness in Black immigrant communities.
Athia Choudhury
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies
Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness
In the book-in-progress, Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness, Choudhury argues that early 20th century U.S. public health policy and scientific knowledge production around diet and fat consumption transformed colonial sensibilities around race and gender into empirical regimes of measurement: data sets on health, eugenics and evolutionary potential. The book conceptualizes the emergence of “metabolic personhood” — a form of subjectivity in which citizenship, fitness and moral worth are measured through bodily optimization — as a defining feature of modern U.S. empire.
Ariel Mosley
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Shifting Standards of Value: Target Gender, Race, and Cultural Preferences Influence Social Perceptions and Hiring Decision Making
Mosley’s project will investigate whether standards of value are applied differently to individuals based on the intersection of race, gender, and cultural expressions, and how these perceptions shape decision-making. The overall rationale is that while multiculturalism is often moralized (e.g., seen as a matter of open-mindedness and tolerance to diversity), the moralization may not be applied equally due to intersectional stereotypes. The research will examine how target race, gender, and cultural presentation jointly influence moral evaluations and hiring judgments.
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2026 College of Letters and Science Faculty Awards
The College of Letters and Science is proud to announce the 2026 faculty awards. These awards honor faculty for exceptional achievement in research innovation, faculty mentoring faculty, faculty mentoring students and community and connection.