4th Cycle – Fall 2012
Below you will find the eleven recipients from this TSG cycle, including those funded under the Original TSG, Health & Welfare (CTSI or H&W), Diversity, Cultural Awareness (CA), and Collaborative Informatics (CI). If you follow the link in the project name field, you will see a map display of the location of the team members' offices.
| Collaborators | Project Name | Diversity | H&W | CA | CI | Description of Project |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeanne Arnold, Anthropology, Social Sciences Division Axel Schmitt, Earth and Space Sciences, Physical Sciences Division Ben Shepard, Anthropology, Social Sciences Division |
Investigating Prehistoric Jade Circulation in Northeast Eurasia using Geochronometric Sourcing Methods | The team hypothesizes that during the Early Bronze Age, inhabitants of the Lake Baikal region of Siberia tended to travel far greater distances than previously thought. The collaborators will use secondary ionization mass spectrometry (SIMS) for determining the geological sources of jade objects from natural outcrops throughout the region as well as to a sample of archaeological materials from the same region. The goal is to compare the extent to which the region’s prehistoric hunter-gatherer inhabitants circulated these objects throughout the region before and after the Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age transition (~3000 BC). | ||||
| Magali Delmas, IoES & Anderson School of Management, Physical Sciences & Anderson School of Management Noah Goldstein, Anderson School of Management Matthew Kahn, IoES, Physical Sciences |
Leveraging SmartMeter Technology to Reduce Energy Consumption | x | A team of UCLA economists, sociologists and psychologists proposes to use novel SmartMeter energy usage data from 30,000 California residential users from 2009 to 2011 to understand how to encourage consumer engagement in energy conservation with SmartMeter technology. They will provide recommendations on how to most effectively target households and neighborhoods with user-specific messages to maximize energy conservation. | |||
| David Gere, World Arts and Culture/Dance, SOAA Ian Holloway, Social Welfare, SPA |
A Multicomponent Evaluation of the AMP! Program at the University of California, Los Angeles | This project is a renewal of a project funded in Cycle 2 of TSG. In this extension of the original project, rather than study the ninth-grade audience members of the AMP! sexual health intervention, the focus turns to the Sex Squad members (UCLA undergraduates who deliver the intervention) and their social networks. There are three phases to this extension: (1) Qualitative focus groups and written feedback from Sex Squad members to understand the quality of their engagement in the intervention program; (2) Social network analyses to examine sexual health communication among Sex Squad members and their personal networks; and (3) Quantitative survey evaluations of UCLA undergraduates who participate in Sex Squad training programs throughout the 2013-2014 academic year. | ||||
| Thom Mayne, Architecture, SOAA David Eisenman, Community Health Sciences/General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research, FSPH/DGSOM Robin Derby, History, Social Sciences Division Eui-Sung Yi, Director of The Now Institute, SOAA Claudine Michel, Department of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara Nadège T. Clitandre, Global and International Studies, UC Santa Barbara |
Community Resilience through Culture: Strategy for Reconstruction in Haiti | x | x | In recent years, community resilience, or the sustained ability of a community to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events, has emerged as a key priority in public health and urban planning. This collaboration proposes to focus on Haiti as a particularly relevant case study, to identify levers of resilience so that these practices may be extended to other vulnerable populations. This research proposes a new collaboration between architecture, public health and cultural studies to develop methods for identifying levers of resilience and translating those values into a physical community design. The research will adopt Haiti as its first case study to redefine the notion of Haitian resilience and set a precedent for more culturally-relevant strategies of reconstruction. | ||
| Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Education, GSEIS Michael Rodriguez, Family Medicine, DGSOM |
Immigrant Youth as Family Health Brokers | x | The project focuses on language and cultural brokering in the health domain. The collaborators will explore the role youth play in mediating immigrant families' understanding of health in a variety of ways, by translating/interpreting in clinics, reading nutritional labels, and participating in family decision-making processes about health and more. There are a number of specific situations that the collaborators propose to explore in order to have a better understanding of how youth navigate these roles, their perceptions about the health system and healthy lifestyles, and how they feel about their roles as interpreters or brokers, as the case may be. The findings from this exploratory project will be used to design future interventions. | |||
| Thomas Philip, Education, GSEIS Gilbert Gee, Community Health Sciences, FSPH Margaret Shih, Anderson School of Management |
Racial Identity, Burn-Out, and Attrition, in New Teachers of Color | x | This project explores the experiences of teachers of color and how these experiences may be related to stress, burn-out, and attrition. The team will focus on racial identity change and racial discrimination in teachers’ classroom and school contexts, and will investigate these factors using a mixed-methods design consisting of in-depth interviews and questionnaires. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of the acute problem of attrition among teachers of color and will inform school-level practices that might mitigate their high turn-over. | |||
| David Shorter, World Arts and Culture/Dance, SOAA Teresa McCarty, Social Research Methodology, GSEIS Jun Wan, Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA David Shaul, Anthropology, Social Sciences Division, University of Arizona |
WIL: Wiki for Indigenous Languages | x | This project brings the user-driven wiki approach to indigenous communities in order to foster language revitalization. Working with the Yoeme (or Yaqui) people of Sonora, Mexico and Arizona, the team has created an ethnographic website that could translate words to and from Yoeme, hold video clips, audio clips, photographs, quizzes, games, and language learning workbooks. Site members will be able to create profiles, chat with each other, help each other with the language, and most importantly, change the contents and even the site’s structure. This project has implications for indigenous people everywhere who struggle with language revitalization. | |||
| Suzanne Shu, Anderson School of Management Lawrence Bassett, Radiological Services, DGSOM Noah Goldstein, Management & Organizations, Anderson School of Management Craig R. Fox, Strategy, Psychology & Medicine, Anderson School of Management, Life Sciences Division & DGSOM Jose Escarce, Medicine, DGSOM Martin F. Shapiro, Medicine & Health Services, DGSOM & School of Public Health |
Reducing Procrastination of Mammograms Through Shorter Implied Deadlines | x | This project tests the impact of short timeframe reminder letters on the scheduling of preventative medical procedures such as mammograms. The collaborators leverage insights from psychology and behavioral economics to compare whether patients given a specific short timeframe in which to schedule an aversive medical screening task will be more likely to schedule and then complete the task than those with an open-ended timeframe. | |||
| Monica Smith, Anthropology, Social Sciences Division Thomas Gillespie, Geography, Social Sciences Division |
Finding History: Predictive Modeling and the Search for Asokan Inscriptions in the Indian Subcontinent | x | Using archaeological data and geographic methods, the team will make a predictive model for the location of as-yet undiscovered examples of the Indian subcontinent’s first writing. The monumental stone inscriptions known as the third-century BC Asokan edicts were placed near population centers but not always in the most topographically distinct location. Using curent geographic models and matching them with data from the longitudinal human-environmental map, the collaborators expect to develop a predictive model that will narrow down the large potential search areas to specific target areas for future ground-truthing of results. | |||
| Dominique Sportiche, Linguistics, Humanities Division Robin Ryder, Mathématiques de la décision, Université Paris -Dauphine et Ceremade Hilda Koopman, Linguistics, Humanities Division Isabelle Charnavel, Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Harvard University |
Toward Exploring the pre-Babel World | This collaboration team proposes to test the hypothesis that all distinct languages have originated from a common ancestor language. Using new capabilities to mathematically model language diversification, this team will attempt to build the genealogical trees first for some languages as a pilot study then for all, to decide to what extent all human languages have common ancestors and when they were spoken and what properties they had. | ||||
| Bonnie Taub, Latin American Studies, Anthropology & Community Health Sciences, Social Sciences Division & FSPH Reza Jarrahy, Division of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, Department of Pediatrics, DGSOM |
Facing the Future: Changing Paradigms in Global Health Delivery | x | x | This team will conduct an anthropological study of indigenous Central American families coping with a child undergoing cleft lip or palate repair and use these observations to formulate a model for health care delivery that incorporates cultural sensitivity. The team will develop a novel assessment tool to understand the cultural beliefs and experiences of Mayan families surrounding pediatric craniofacial deformities and a protocol for incorporation of cultural sensitivity into standard clinical assessments used in global surgical mission settings. |
