Grants in Action!

Student volunteers and community residents planted 200 trees on the Preserve at Vassar as part of a three-day project in September. The aim was to provide a buffer for the Casper Kill, a stream that runs through part of the Preserve, and to help foster the animal habitat. Preserve Director Keri VanCamp said the College used a $40,000 grant from a local conservation group, Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley, to purchase 40 trees with a diameter of two inches or more and 160 smaller ones for the project. More than 50 species of trees—maple, American boxwood, sorghum, and cockspur thorn, to name just a few—were selected to enhance the Preserve’s biodiversity. The project is part of a comprehensive plan undertaken by the College to improve the entrance to the 500-acre Preserve, thanks to a major gift from the class of 1971. The gift will fund improved pathways; new pedestrian-safe paths to the Barns; modifications to vehicle traffic routes; and parking and signage to create a more welcoming entrance to the Farm and Preserve. VanCamp said the next phase of improvements will include the construction of a pavilion for picnicking and other gatherings by members of the local community as well as those from Vassar.

For more than a century, students, faculty, and staff in Vassar’s Music Department, student choral groups, and the Vassar Libraries have been creating and collecting recordings of Vassar musical performances, but the collections have been physically deteriorating and incompletely cataloged, making them largely inaccessible to music scholars wishing to conduct research.

A $40,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation through the Council on Library and Information Resources “Recordings at Risk” program enabled the College to digitize nearly 300 performances recorded on phonograph records, tapes, and compact discs between 1934 and 2016. They are available for listening at Vassar’s Digital Library by members of the Vassar community; educators and researchers may request access by emailing library_systems@vassar.edu. The recordings include formal concerts, Vassar class “parties” (original musical plays), a cappella group performances, school songs, and collaborations between Vassar faculty, students, and choral groups from other colleges and universities.

“Recordings at Risk” is a limited-term (2017-2025) national regranting program to support preservation of rare and unique audio, audiovisual, and other media through digital reformatting. The digitization was done by firms in Philadelphia, PA, and Andover, MA.

The rise in carbon-dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels has long been acknowledged as a major cause of global warming, and the resulting rise in ocean temperatures has likewise been linked to climate change. But what if the ocean could help us absorb more carbon dioxide? Laura Haynes, Assistant Professor of Earth Science on the Mary Clark Rockefeller Chair, pictured above, will lead a comprehensive initiative to explore this question as a recipient of a $480,415 research grant from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Haynes, along with Jennifer Fehrenbacher, Associate Professor of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, and Emily Osborne, a Research Scientist at NOAA, will collaborate on a study. It will assess how proposals to use the ocean to combat the rise in carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere will affect marine organisms. Some are proposing to dump alkaline minerals into the ocean to help it absorb and store more carbon dioxide, but the impacts of these actions on marine life remain largely unknown. Haynes, Fehrenbacher, and Osborne will investigate how adding these minerals to the ocean would affect foraminifera—small, shell-building plankton that are important to the ocean’s carbon cycle.

Haynes, who has been studying foraminifera throughout her academic career, said the grant would fund research she will be doing at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences in summer 2025 and 2026. She will recruit four Vassar students each year to assist her in her research. The grant is part of a $24.3 million project funded by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, a consortium of public and private organizations including NOAA, the National Science Foundation, the federal Department of Energy, the Office of Naval Research, and the ClimateWorks Foundation.

According to recent studies, four-year colleges in the United States graduate about half of their students in six years. But some institutions, including some that lack the resources of more prestigious colleges and universities, achieve much higher than expected results. A team of Vassar College researchers, headed by President Elizabeth H. Bradley, has secured a $125,000 grant from Lumina Foundation to learn how and why these institutions are succeeding.

Bradley will be joined by Wendy Maragh Taylor, Associate Dean of the College for Student Growth and Engagement, and Professor of Education Christopher Bjork as lead investigators on the project. Charlotte Gullick, Exploring Transfer Together Program Manager, and Biniam Tesfamariam, Vassar’s Director of Institutional Research, are the other members of the team. They plan to visit six institutions having greater than expected results over the next 12 months, meeting with faculty, students, and administrators to gather relevant data.

The Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Lumina envisions higher learning that is easy to navigate, addresses racial injustice, and meets the nation’s talent needs through a broad range of credentials. The foundation aims to work toward a system that prepares people for informed citizenship and success in a global economy. —Larry Hertz