Grant Recipients & Outcomes

What Goes Right and Wrong at School: Perspectives of Young Autistic Adults, Their Parents, and Educators
For years, less than 4%* of U.S. autism research funding has been focused on autism in adulthood. Dr. Anderson has dedicated herself to this under-researched area, conducting in-depth interviews with young adults on the autism spectrum and their parents. The emphasis for her work has been on what occurs after high school in terms of adult services, employment, and postsecondary education. The goal is to reveal challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve outcomes for autistic individuals across the lifespan.

Work on Novel Methods of Urban Reforestation
Dr. Beauchamp is a plant community ecologist with research interests that include urban forest succession, the effects of invasive plant species on community diversity, the effects of deer browse on ecosystem processes, and the ecology of riparian plant communities. This work looks at the success of different planting methods for urban reforestation projects used to capture nutrients and reduce pollution discharges into the Chesapeake Bay.

Caringscapes of End-of-Life Care in Northern Ghana
Dr. Hanrahan is a feminist geographer interested in how everyday spaces are constructed as people engage in caring relationships that aim to support the needs of others experiencing dependencies and vulnerabilities, as well as how caring relations can be fraught and harmful. Her current a project considers the ways in which end of life care is woven together from formal health services and extensive informal care strategies. In this context, end of life care is aimed at addressing physical and emotional needs within intergenerational relationships that are traced along material and psychical connections across the past, present, and future.

Small Proteins in Bacteria
Little is known about the abundance of small proteins in any organism. These proteins are difficult to isolate and identify using standard biochemical techniques. Since 2012, we have offered a Course-based Research Experience (CURE) Molecular Biology Laboratory class where students test for protein expression in the bacterium Escherichia coli, potentially discovering new small proteins. Once identified, students then characterize small protein expression and function in the lab as independent researchers. Dr. Hemm's current work in the lab focuses on characterizing the prevalence of this type of small protein and investigating their role in E. coli cell biology.

Investor Sentiment and Holiday Effect on the Cryptocurrency Market
Dr. Huang's research explores underlying mechanisms of the cryptocurrency holiday effect, including the influence of epidemic transmission risk and heterogeneity characteristics. Overall, this work advances our understanding of the holiday effect phenomenon, providing valuable insights for investors, financial researchers, and institutions in the dynamic cryptocurrency market.

Waves of Pipe Organ Jazz Across the Ocean
Dr. Luchese has been researching the use of pipe organs in jazz and rock musical styles. Being the first of its kind, her book, Piping Hot: Blasting the Pipe Organ Outside the Classical Music Canon, will provide the historical, social and musical contexts enveloping these examples, as well as serve as a reference that lists every recording of the pipe organ in rock or jazz to date, thereby filling a void in the scholarship of pipe organ practices as well as contributing to rock/jazz scholarship.

Preparing Effective Writing Teachers
Dr. McQuitty’s research focuses on preparing teachers to implement high-quality writing instruction in K-12 schools. This project, done in close collaboration Dr. Pamela Hickey, seeks to determine how teachers learn to teach writing and how teacher education programs can best support their learning. Through this work, they were able to determine how teacher education programs can best support writing teachers and improve their writing instruction in their future classrooms.

Work on Organizational Behavior with a Focus on Worker Owned Cooperatives in Baltimore
Dr. Mello’s present research is focused on the specific organizational context of worker cooperatives. Worker cooperatives are defined as businesses that are cooperatively owned and democratically controlled by their worker-owners. This project takes a mixed-method approach with surveys of individual differences in addition to in-depth interviews with worker-owners. The long-term goals are to better understand the unique organizational dynamics of worker coops for the purpose of better supporting existing and new coops in the Baltimore regional area.

Using Immersive Virtual Reality to Enhance Intercultural Sensitivity: An Empirical Study
Dr. Moallem's study aims to develop and pilot test implementing an immersive VR intervention to enhance teacher education students' cultural sensitivity. It further assesses the efficacy of I-VR as a medium to develop empathy, emotion, motivation, and desire to understand, appreciate and accept differences among cultures.

Risk Management in Election Security
Dr. Scala co-directs the Empowering Secure Elections research lab at Towson University, which is committed to non-partisan academic research that increases the security of U.S. elections and ensures the integrity of votes from the moment they are cast to the moment they are counted. This project examines potential threats to in-person voting, especially precinct count optical scan machines, which are used in Maryland and will be used by almost 70% of the country in 2024.

Work on British Satire in the Age of the Revolution
Visual metaphors, linking political figures and events to food and commodities, formed the basis for a distinct genre of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century satirical prints made by British artists sympathetic to the plight of the American colonists surrounding the years of the Revolution. This project combines Dr. Siegel’s academic expertise in both art and culinary histories. She posits that the culinary iconography found within these prints is more than merely humor-driven with popular appeal.

Measuring Listening Effort in Complex Environments Using Eye Tracking
Dr. Srinivasan is the director of the Spatial Hearing and Auditory PErception (SHAPE) lab. The ultimate goal is to develop statistical models that reveal how the variability on a given behavioral test is related to multiple predictors of speech perception and to better understand the difficulties in perceiving speech in complex listening environments by individuals with varying hearing abilities.