Come get your global interdisciplinary fix! Lightning presentations by CGII graduate student grant recipients.
Andrew Avitabile (Education) "Evaluating a Comprehensive School Health Program in Zambia"
Healthy Learners is an international NGO that developed an innovative, low-cost school health program in Zambia. Their program delivers a comprehensive range of services through teachers trained as “School Health Workers”. Using a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), a team of researchers will evaluate the impact of the Healthy Learners program on outcomes such as student health and education. The GGR award has enabled Andrew Avitabile, an education policy PhD student at UVA, to travel to Zambia and support the launch of the study.
Eric Bredder (Education) "Roversa Robot: Low cost, Flexible, Multilingual Robot for Learning Computer Science in Elementary School and Beyond"
Roversa is a low-cost, flexible robot that introduces students to physical, sequential programming skills with the ability to grow with the learner. The robot currently supports Spanish/English languages leveraging the popular micro:bit ecosystem so teachers and students can easily engage with this tool. Roversa is being piloted in Latin America and the United States. There are 50 devices being assembled in Colombia for testing and feedback. We are beginning to develop a refined circuit board for manufacturing to increase access, speed up production, lower the cost of the current device, and provide options for future expansion.
Sophie Maffie (Architecture) "Fibers of Resilience: Multi-Scalar Architectural Resilience and Adaptability of the Uru People"
Fibers of Resilience examines the relationship between indigenous horticultural traditions and architectural knowledge as a form of self-determination and environmental resilience in Lake Titicaca. Maffie has administered ethnographic interviews, documented landscape architectural details, drawn horticultural traditions, and conducted geospatial mapping to reveal and examine otherwise hidden geographies. This project will promote an understanding of the international interdependence of horticulture and will disseminate the ways in which vernacular landscapes provide a form of resilience.
A. Omokolade Omigbule (Anthropology) "Towards an Amphibious Archaeology of the Biafran Atlantic: c. 1600 CE- present"
Historical records attest the Bight of Biafra as a significant European entrepôt during the Trans-Atlantic period. Through archaeological evidence, this project investigates daily life and the material histories of the Trans-Atlantic period in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. Specifically, it explores similarities and divergences in the global experience of West Africans between the 17th-19th centuries CE. Focusing on the lives of African traders and other local people, it compares the cultural articulations that ensued here with what occurred in other parts of West Africa and the African diaspora.
Robert Porter (Biology) "Variation of the Timing of Dormancy in Temporally Heterogeneous Environments"
As rapid environmental variation becomes more pronounced in the wake of climate change, understanding how organisms adapt to changing environments becomes increasingly important. This project will investigate local adaptation in the timing of dormancy, the cues associated with the entrance and exit of dormancy, and how mismatches between changes in the environment and the timing of dormancy impact organisms by using the keystone species Daphnia pulex.
Catered lunch will be provided.
