Emory NSF CAREER Proposal Academy

Ten-Week Proposal Preparation Program Begins May 14; Register by Wednesday, April 23

Pre-tenure and postdoctoral faculty whose research is in an area funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) are invited to participate in a ten-week “NSF CAREER Proposal Academy,” to be held in the summer 2025. The Academy will begin Wednesday, May 14th, with subsequent sessions held once a week on Wednesdays until July 16th. The NSF CAREER proposal submission deadline is Wednesday, July 23rd. Each session starts at noon with a 90-minute workshop followed by an optional afternoon of dedicated writing time. Zoom attendance options will be available.

The Academy is designed to support and guide the development of a highly competitive NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) proposal. Sessions will cover aspects of proposal development from project idea conception to submission, including mentoring/coaching from experienced administrators, faculty, and staff. Participants will also be able to engage in one-on-one consultations and coaching from the Academy facilitators. Each session will cover one aspect in the process of putting together a CAREER proposal. 

Academy participants should be planning to either submit a new proposal or revise and resubmit a previous proposal for the upcoming deadline of July 23rd or plan to submit in the next few years. 

The deadline to register is April 23. Please visit this link to register.

Sloan Foundation Awards Fellowship to Emory Neuroscientist

Malavika Murugan, Emory assistant professor of biology, received a 2025 research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers. The Sloan Research Fellowships honor exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian institutions whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.

Murugan uses in vivo cellular-resolution calcium imaging, optogenetics, and viral-targeting strategies in rodents, combined with advanced computational methods, to understand how the brain supports complex social behaviors. Specifically, she’s exploring how the brain processes external sensory information from social stimuli and integrates it with internally generated states, such as hunger or fear, to drive appropriate social interactions.

Many past Sloan Fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science. To date, 58 Sloan Fellows have received a Nobel Prize, including John Hopfield, last year’s Nobel laureate in physics. In addition, 72 have won the National Medal of Science, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, and 24 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2009.

Murugan is the 18th Emory faculty member to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship.  

Why Democracy is in Danger: Democratic Backsliding 

The United States is experiencing what political scientists call "democratic backsliding." All of the leading global democracy indices have registered a decline for the United States since 2016. Just to take one example, Freedom House is a global freedom index that scores all countries every year from a low of 0 to a high of 100. A decade ago, the United States got a score of a 92 out of 100, which put it broadly on par with Canada, Japan, and Germany. Today, the US's score is 83. Still a democracy, but tied with Romania and below Argentina. That may seem shocking to some of you, but when you have widespread efforts to restrict access to the ballot; when you have violent threats against election workers, elected officials, judges, and prosecuters; and when you have an attempt by an incumbent president to overturn an election, you come to the point when Freedom House considers you less democratic than Argentina.

-- Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, Professor of Government, Harvard University, "Why Democracy is in Danger," The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Democracy: Past Present, Future Inaugural Address, September 18, 2024

Atlanta Global Research and Education Collaborative Funding Up to $20,000

Emory University has partnered with Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, Agnes Scott College, Spelman College, Kennesaw State University, and Clark Atlanta University to form the Atlanta Global Research and Education Collaborative (AGREC). AGREC seeks to build and strengthen collaborative networks of multi-institutional scholars and practitioners to support global research and education initiatives in partnership with community connecting Atlanta and the rest of the world. AGREC invites scholars to submit collaborative projects across disciplines, institutions, and universities that address a need in our global and local communities.

Submit a proposal by April 18, 2025.

At Emory, the AGREC partnership is stewarded by Atlanta Global Partnerships at Emory Global Engagement. For more info, please email Obse Ababiya obse.ababiya@emory.edu. 

Visit the AGREC site for details. 

Mehtap Ozdemir, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature

Mehtap Ozdemir is assistant professor of comparative literature at Emory University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2022. From 2021 to 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bologna, conducting archival research and digitization in the European Research Council-funded project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities.” Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in Turkish, English, French, and Persian, Mehtap Ozdemir’s teaching and research engages several fields in a translingual compass: global modernities, critical translation theory, comparative poetics and world literature, secularization, empire and postcolonial studies, and literary ethics. Her current book project, provisionally titled “Theology, Translation, and Ottoman Cosmopolitics,” explores how poiesis as creation/formation/making animates an account of cosmopolitics, a worldly ethic, which is grounded, moral, and humanist across a religious-secular divide in the Ottoman zone of translation, and, as such, counters the risks of strictly religious or secular humanism in the modern era. She has published and forthcoming articles in Philological Encounters, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Comparative Literature Studies, Decolonial Reconstellations: Towards an Ethical Global Studies, and The Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism.

Monday, March 3                

At noon at the Woodruff Library Jones Room, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference Colloquium presents Holly Pinherio Jr., assistant professor, African American history, Furman University, who will give a talk titled "The Families’ Civil War." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 1 p.m. at Health Sciences Research Building II room N600 and on Zoom, the Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines Seminar presents Rachel Kinsella, assistant professor, Emory School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Disease, who will give a talk titled "Dissecting the role of neutrophils in Mycobacterium tuberculosis immunopathology." For more information, please visit this webpage.   

At 1 p.m. at Anthropology room 206, the Department of Anthropology presents Carlye Chaney, post-doctoral research fellow, anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, who will give a talk titled "Locally situated biologies and infrastructural violence: Identifying the mechanisms linking contamination, the gut microbiome, and health inequities." For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At 3:30 p.m. at Berman Library CSLR Suite, the Center for the Study of Law and Religion presents a Work in Progress Session during which Dana Lloyd, assistant professor of global interdisciplinary studies, Villanova University, will present for discussion and feedback a draft of the first chapter in a book on motherhood and law. For more information, please email mlfinem@emory.edu. 

Tuesday, March 4              

At 10:30 a.m. at the Carlos Museum, the Homeschool Day Series presents Storyful Past. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At noon at Convocation Hall, the Halle Institute for Global Research Turkish Lecture presents Ali Çarkoğlu, professor of international relations at Koç University and visiting researcher at the The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, who will give a talk focused on the evolution of electoral dynamics in Turkey from 1990 to 2023. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 12:30 p.m. at Health Sciences Research Building II room N600 and on Zoom, the Aflac Research Conference presents Patricia Zerra, assistant professor of pathology & laboratory medicine and pediatrics, Emory School of Medicine, who will give a talk titled "Characterizing the Immune Response to Factor VIII in Hemophilia A." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 1 p.m. on Zoom, Emory Libraries presents a Zotero workshop presented by Keeza Hameed, science librarian for biology and neuroscience. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 2 p.m. on Zoom, the Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center presents Emory BrainTalk Live, a weekly webinar of discussions led by expert faculty clinicians. For more information and to register, please visit this webpage. 

At 2:30 p.m. at the Math and Science Center room E300, the Physics Department Colloquium presents Shenshen Wang, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, University of California Los Angeles, who will give a talk titled "The rapid evolution within us: large effects of small forces in immune learning." For more information, please visit this webpage.    

At 3 p.m. at the Oxford Road Building Living Room, the Office of the Provost Faculty Affairs presents Fireside Chat with Women Leaders at Emory. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 4 p.m. at the Modern Languages Building room 201, the department of Spanish and Portuguese presents a Portuguese Poetry Contest. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 5:30 p.m. at Casa Emory, the department of Spanish and Portuguese presents una Tarde de poesía en español. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At 7 p.m. at White Hall room 110, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies presents Jason Danino-Holt, artist, who will give a talk titled "Art, Uncertainty, and Crisis: An Artist’s Reflection from Israel Since 10/7." For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At 8 p.m. on Zoom, the Candler Foundry presents a webinar titled "AI and the Future of Christianity." For more information, please visit this webpage.

Wednesday, March 5

At 10 a.m. on Brainer, Emory Human Resources Practicing Allyship Series presents a webinar titled "Navigating a Multigenerational Workplace." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 10:30 a.m. on Zoom, the Emory Video Production Team presents a drop-in during whichdEmory faculty and staff can ask questions about online video, lighting, audio, equipment, storyboarding, flipped classroom projects, graphic design, visual aids, and other media-related needs. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At 11 a.m. at the Rita Anne Rollins Building room 252, the Religion in the Americas Colloquium presents Melissa Borja, associate professor, University of Michigan, who will give a talk titled "American Christians and Immigration and Refugee Justice: Lessons from the Past." For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At noon on Zoom, the Emory Alumni Association presents a webinar titled "Ask-A-Coach: The Do's and Don'ts of Interviewing." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 1 p.m. at the Rose Library Woodruff Seminar Room, the Rose Library presents a symposium titled "The Expanding Public Domain." For more information, please visit this webpage.   

At 1 p.m. at Woodruff Library room 314, the Library & Information Technology Services presents a workshop titled "Using AI Research Assistants." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 1 p.m. at Anthropology room 206, the anthropology department presents Laura Van Holstein, junior research fellow, biological anthropology, Clare College, Cambridge, UK, who will give a talk titled "Human evolution in comparative perspective." For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 4 p.m. at the Woodruff Library Jones Room and on Zoom, the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Keyword Lecture presents Kylie M. Smith, associate professor and director of the Center for Healthcare History and Policy, and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities, who will give a talk titled "Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the Jim Crow South." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 4:30 p.m. at Tull Auditorium, the 2025 Overton and Lavona Currie Lecture presents Dana Lloyd, assistant professo of global interdisciplinary studies, Villanova University, who will give a talk titled "Land as Kin: Religious Freedom and Indigenous Sovereignty in Yurok County." For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 7 p.m. at the Carlos Museum Ackerman Hall, the Carlos Museum presents Sarah Murray (classics, University of Toronto) who will give a talk titled "The Archaeology of an Athenian Beach Resort: Uncovering the Past of Porto Rafti." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 7:30 p.m. at White Hall room 208, Emory Cinematheque's Film on Film series presents Goodbye, Dragon Inn. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

Thursday, March 6

At 10 a.m. on Brainer, Emory Human Resources Practicing Allyship Series presents a webinar titled "Introduction to Neurodiversity." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 11:30 a.m. at the O. Wayne Rollins Research Center, Room 1052, the Biology Seminar Series presents Pravrutha Raman, postdoctoral fellow, basic sciences division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who will give a talk titled "Evolutionary innovations in eukaryotic histone repertoires drive biological novelties." For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At noon at the R. Randall Rollins Deborah McFarland Room, the Humphrey Noontime Seminar presents Jagadish Joshi, Humphrey Fellow, and Jerome Nyhalah, Humphrey Fellow. For more information, please visit this webpage. 

At noon in Whitehead Auditorium, Jodi Hadden-Perilla, C. Eugene Bennett Early Career Chair of Chemistry assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, University of Delaware, will give a talk titled "Icosahedral virus capsids through the computational microscope." For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At noon at the Children's Marcus Autism Center and on Zoom, the Marcus Autism & BMH Centers Grand Rounds presents Noor Z. Al Dahhan, postdoctoral research fellow, neurosciences and mental health program, the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, who will give a talk titled "Exploring the Network Circuitry of Emotion-Cognition Interactions and Mental Health Outcomes." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 1 p.m. at Health Sciences Research Building II room N600 and on Zoom, the Center for Cystic Fibrosis and Airways Disease Research Seminar Series presents Peter Jorth, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Cedars-Sinai, who will give a talk titled "Exploiting antimicrobial resistance evolution for treatment opportunities." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 4:30 p.m. at the Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building room 290, the Department of French and Italian presents Beatrice Arduini, associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian Studies, Washington University, who will give a talk titled "Tracing Representations of Domestic Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Italy." For more information, please visit this webpage.   

At 5:30 p.m. at the Hatchery, the Emory Center for Innovation presents a seminar titled "The Art and Science of Quantifying Pain." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 6 p.m. at the Oxford College Chapel, a Cello Duet of CongCong Bi and Alexander Russkovsky will present a concert. For more information, please visit this webpage.    

At 6:30 p.m. at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church, the Catholic-Orthodox Community Gathering presents Carl McColman, contemplative Christian writer, who will give a talk titled "Spiritual Wisdom from the Desert Mothers and Fathers." For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 8 p.m. at the  Schwartz Center for Performing Arts Emerson Concert Hall, the Emory University Symphony Orchestra presents a concert. For more information, please visit this webpage.   

Friday, March 7  

At 8:30 a.m. at the Emory Center for Ethics room 102, the Center for AI Learning presents the AI, Systems, and Society Conference. For more information, please visit this webpage.

At 9 a.m. on Zoom, the School of Medicine presents the  Virtual Rare Disease Day Symposium. For more information, please visit this webpage.   

At noon at Convocation Hall room 204, the Emory College of Arts and Sciences First Friday Series presents Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk,assistant teaching professor of music, Emory, who will give a talk titled "Aazhigaa nagliqtaaq: Amazing Grace." For more information, please visit this webpage.

Saturday, March 8

At 10 a.m. at the Carlos Museum, the Carlos Museum presents Relaxed Morning, a time for anyone who would appreciate a calmer visit to the museum. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

At 2 p.m. at the Carlos Museum, the Carlos Museum presents a Student Guide Tour. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

Sunday, March 9 

At 2 p.m. starting at the Carlos Museum rotunda, the Carlos Museum presents a Sunday Public Tour, a docent-led tour free with museum admission. For more information, please visit this webpage.  

Monday, March 10

Spring Break begins. No events currently scheduled.

ThoughtWork: Emerging Knowledge and News in Emory's Intellectual Community

Monday, February 24, 2025, Volume 25, Issue 24

ThoughtWork is a publication of the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, which is supported by the Office of the Provost. This electronic newsletter list is moderated; replies are not automatically forwarded to the list of recipients. Please email aadam02@emory.edu with comments and calendar submissions. Calendar submissions are due 5:00pm the Wednesday before the week of the event. Dates and details of events on calendar are subject to change; please confirm with organizers before you attend.

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