Examples of Foundation Grants to Dartmouth
Advancing Learning Outcomes
The Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), in collaboration with the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University, has received a $200,000, two-year grant from the Teagle Foundation. The funds will help academic departments and programs on both campuses define learning outcomes for their majors and develop measurable assessments of those outcomes. read more
Enhancing Science Education
Dartmouth has been awarded $800,000 from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for a program aimed at retaining undergraduates in the sciences. The funding will help establish a new introductory biology and chemistry course that blends the two disciplines, takes advantage of real-life applications and issues, and is held over the course of two terms. read more
At right: Roger Sloboda, Ira Allen Eastman Professor of Biological Sciences and HHMI program director. (Photo by Joseph Mehling)
Institute for Writing and Rhetoric
Dartmouth College’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric has received a $200,000 grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to research and assess the best practices for writing instruction across diverse disciplines. The project, called Re-envisioning Composition: Assessment, Knowledge Transfer, and Emerging Literacies, provides 85 Dartmouth faculty the opportunity to study the latest research in the fields of composition and literacy. read more
Climate Justice Research Project
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Michael Dorsey was recently awarded $300,000 from the Ford Foundation to launch the Climate Justice Research Project. The project is dedicated to studying the racial and social inequities that occur in addressing climate change. read more
Sustainability Initiative
Dartmouth’s Sustainability Initiative has received $200,000 through a $135,000 grant from the Morgan Family Foundation of Los Altos, Calif., and a $65,000 gift from Mary Morgan Finegan, a member of the Dartmouth class of 1986. The foundation grant will fund efforts to weave sustainability into all aspects of Dartmouth’s operations. The Finegan gift will support student initiatives in the Sustainable Living Center residence hall. read more
At right: Sustainable Living Center logo designed by Kate Schnippering '10.
Women in Engineering
Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering has been awarded a grant to support two women as Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellows in Thayer's new Ph.D. Innovation Program. The goal of this award is to encourage full participation of women in the nation's first doctoral-level engineering Innovation Program designed to address the rising need for people with both technical and entrepreneurial expertise. read more
Faculty Enrichment
Larry Polansky, the Jacob H. Strauss Professor in Music, has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support his emerging interest in American Sign Language (ASL) poetry and performance. This type of award, according to the Mellon Foundation, is for advanced training in pursuit of a specific research agenda outside the recipient’s own discipline, and as a long-term investment in his intellectual range and productivity. read more
Access to Special Collections
Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library houses one of the world’s most extensive bodies of research materials on the North and South Poles, and thanks to a grant from The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, two key collections from that material will be fully digitized, making them easier to access and available to scholars everywhere. The $20,000 grant will be used to digitize 1,500 Arctic photographs and the unpublished 12,000-page Encyclopedia Arctica. Both projects are from the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration, which is comprised of research materials collected by anthropologist and polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. read more
At right: Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson dragging a seal, from the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration (courtesy Rauner Special Collections Library).
Policy Research Shop
At the Policy Research Shop (PRS), a program developed by Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, undergraduate students at Dartmouth conduct objective research and offer their findings to the New Hampshire and Vermont state legislatures and local governments. In 2007, the PRS received a $300,000/three-year funding commitment from the Ford Foundation. With the Ford Foundation grant, the program will be able to expand and improve its operations, adding a post-doctoral fellow and a graduate research fellow to the staff and developing more public policy curricular offerings. read more
At right: PRS participants William O’Neal, graduate student in chemistry, Scott Abramson ’06, and Chongwon Char ’06 present findings from their report on renewable energy portfolios to the New Hampshire House Committee on Science, Technology, and Energy in 2006. (Photo by Ben McLeod)
Biological Sciences
In 2006, Dartmouth received $1.5 million in funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Undergraduate Science Education Program for a variety of initiatives that enhance the biological sciences department offerings and promote the interdisciplinary nature of biology. The award is part of a nationwide program to strengthen undergraduate teaching that will provide $86.4 million to support programs at 50 universities. read more
Kemeny Hall
In 2004, the trustees of the Kresge Foundation awarded Dartmouth College a $1 million challenge grant to support construction of Kemeny Hall, which now houses the mathematics department and honors former president John G. Kemeny (read more). In 2005, the College met that challenge (read more) and Kemeny Hall was dedicated in 2006 (read more).
Baker-Berry Library and the Starr Instructional Center
Generous support from both foundation and individual donors, among them the George F. Baker Trust, the Berry Family Foundation, the Carson Family Charitable Trust, and the Starr Foundation, made possible the renovation of the Baker Library and the construction of the adjacent Berry Library. Construction was completed in 2002. The resulting Baker-Berry Library will allow the college to house collections of nearly twice the current size. Berry was designed with digital resources and online learning in mind as well. It is now home to Academic Computing, which assists faculty in the use of technology for teaching. The Starr Instructional Center, on the second floor of Berry, is a state-of-the-art instructional facility with 20 student workstations and an instructor's workstation with projection capability. The Center is used by faculty for regular classes and by librarians for bibliographic instruction, as well as for staff training by various campus departments.
Cognitive Neuroscience
With a grant of $1 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation and support from General Electric Company, Dartmouth became the first liberal arts school in the country to own and operate a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine strictly for research purposes. The lab with its GE 1.5 Tesla scanner became fully operational in February 2000. Research conducted at the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center applies both behavioral and brain imaging techniques to explore such areas as memory formation, language processing, and other functions of the brain. The primary neuroimaging technique used in the lab is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
In the photo here, Professor Scott Grafton, Director of the Dartmouth Functional Brain Imaging Center, analyzes brain scans with Anjali Jalota '01, left, and Neha Shroff '02. (Photo by Joseph Mehling '69, Dartmouth College Photographer.)
Undergraduate Research
Many foundations support undergraduate research since they recognize its critical importance in the training of scientists. The Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Richter Funds, Kimball Foundation, George Norman Albree Trust, The Marion & Walter Minton Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations are among the organizations that have provided support for student research.
Photograph © John Douglas/Flying Squirrel
Wildlife Habitat Project
College Forester Kevin Evans holds an American Woodcock, a native game species, before attaching a radio collar to the bird. The three year study of Woodcock habitat and mortality rates is a discrete project within the overall Wildlife Habitat Project at the Second College Grant, which aims to integrate planned wildlife habitat manipulation strategies into annual forestry harvests. Students and faculty from Environmental Studies, Biology, and Earth Sciences are involved in numerous research projects funded in part by major grants from the R. K. Mellon Foundation, the Charles A. Mastronardi Foundation, and the Sweetwater Trust.
Hood Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative
A grant of $531,290 over a five year period from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Foundation enabled the Hood museum to create a variety of outreach programs that affect thousands of school children from throughout Vermont and New Hampshire as part of the Images program. The students pictured are from the Grantham Village School. Subsequent grants from the Brown Foundation and Charles Hood Foundation have endowed the outreach programs in perpetuity.