2008 — 2012 |
Danowski, Barbara Fox, Kristin Yaisawarng, Suthathip Johnson, Brenda Anderson-Hanley, Cay |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Advance Partnerships For Adaptation, Implementation, and Dissemination (Paid) Award: Collaborative Research - Sun: Supporting Women Faculty in Stem At Liberal Arts Colleges
This project is a collaboration of Skidmore College and Union College, two small, selective liberal arts colleges located in close proximity in upstate New York, to enhance the recruitment and retention of women in the STEM disciplines and to promote their advancement through rank. The multifaceted program uses and adapts exemplary tools from NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation programs at large research institutions to the climate and conditions at Skidmore and Union Colleges and more broadly contributes to the adaptation, translation, development and expansion of these resources to predominately undergraduate liberal arts colleges in general.
Intellectual merit. The adaptation of exemplary tools from large research institutions to Skidmore College and Union College, where the relative importance of teaching, scholarship, and service is quite different from research universities, will provide valuable models and resources for the NSF ADVANCE "Best Practices" portfolio. It should be noted that Skidmore and Union differ from one another in significant ways: Skidmore, co-educational since 1971, was originally a women's college that traditionally emphasized arts and humanities. Over the course of the past decade, it has been successful in increasing the role of the STEM disciplines in its curriculum. Union is a formerly all-male college, also coeducational since 1970, that historically has had a strong academic science and engineering orientation -- approximately 40% of its students major in the lab sciences and engineering. Thus, the two institutions bring different experiences and strengths to the project, and tools developed for this project are expected to have broad applicability to a wide variety of liberal arts institutions.
The project targets women faculty in the STEM disciplines at two specific career stages: tenure-track women and tenured associate professors who have been at that rank for seven or more years. A central goal is to provide these women with the resources and support to move up in rank from assistant to tenured associate professor or from associate to full professor. In addition, we seek to understand local climate issues that affect hiring, faculty development, and promotion of women and create environments that will result in a more balanced gender ratio in STEM disciplines at our institutions. The project comprises two types of activities: (1) activities aimed at recognizing and combating gender bias in the STEM disciplines, including climate surveys, training workshops for hiring and promotion, public events to raise awareness across campus and educational activities to reduce undergraduate bias; and (2) activities providing STEM faculty with mentoring and development opportunities to help them advance their careers, including: the creation of a cross-institutional mentoring network of women in the STEM disciplines and support for research, advanced education and teaching load modification. The activities in this project will be adapted from exemplary practices currently in use at other ADVANCE institutions, such as Virginia Tech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Michigan. They will be overseen by a Skidmore-Union Network (SUN) Committee of STEM faculty that is modeled after a successful ADVANCE program at the University of Michigan. A website will be developed to help participating women learn about all the programs that are offered, and also to facilitate finding potential collaborators and mentors.
Broader impacts. This project is designed to build a sustainable partnership between two highly regarded liberal arts colleges for the enhancement, recruitment, retention and advancement of women in the STEM disciplines and to broadly disseminate the models and resources developed under this grant to other liberal arts schools. It contains activities and tools to strengthen the teaching and scholarship of women faculty in the STEM disciplines, through the development of web-based resources that are accessible to a wide range of schools and their faculty, and by the dissemination of its practices and findings to other liberal arts colleges seeking to advance the careers of their women faculty.
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1 |
2013 |
Anderson-Hanley, Cay |
R15Activity Code Description: Supports small-scale research projects at educational institutions that provide baccalaureate or advanced degrees for a significant number of the Nation’s research scientists but that have not been major recipients of NIH support. The goals of the program are to (1) support meritorious research, (2) expose students to research, and (3) strengthen the research environment of the institution. Awards provide limited Direct Costs, plus applicable F&A costs, for periods not to exceed 36 months. This activity code uses multi-year funding authority; however, OER approval is NOT needed prior to an IC using this activity code. |
Cognitive Benefits of Interactive Mental and Physical Exercise For McI
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The rise in dementia cases has led to calls for behavioral interventions to enhance brain health to delay the onset or progression of cognitive impairment. There is growing evidence of the cognitive benefits of exercise, but less is known about combined interventions. Our primary goal is to replicate and extend our recently concluded randomized clinical trial (RCT) investigating interactive physical and mental exercise, Cybercycling for Cognitive Health (Anderson-Hanley et al., 2012a). This RCT was conducted by the PI and collaborators with 63 independent living older adults. We found significant cognitive benefit after three months of simultaneously combined physical and mental exercise (i.e., exergaming), when contrasted with physical exercise alone. We compared physical exercise on a traditional stationary bike, with interactive physical and mental exercise on a cybercycle. A cybercycle is a virtual reality-enhanced stationary bike with interactive cycling tours, on-screen competitors, and videogame capabilities. Results suggest that for the same effort, interactive physical and mental exercise on a cybercycle can yield greater cognitive benefit than physical exercise alone on a stationary bike. We wish to extend our research to persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), to examine the generalizability of the above finding to those already experiencing cognitive decline, with the hypothesis that cybercycling can slow decline more than either physical or mental exercise alone. We also aim to add to the scientific understanding of the phenomenon of increased cognitive benefit when physical and cognitive exercises are interactive, by comparing cybercycling with mental and physical exercise implemented individually. The primary method of this study will be an RCT (Aim 1), and we propose to enroll 81 patients with MCI. Participants will be randomized into one of three conditions for six months: cybercycle, stationary bike alone, or videogame alone. Comprehensive evaluations will include: neuropsychological (e.g., executive function and memory), behavioral (e.g., compliance and effort/watts), physiological (e.g., cardiorespiratory fitness), biomarker (e.g., BDNF), [deleted EEG/ERP] and an expanded neuroimaging pilot (n=30 MRI; Anderson-Hanley et al., 2012b). We expect that cognitive benefit will be greatest for the cybercycle condition, followed by physical exercise alone, and finally a smaller effect from mental exercise alone. To clarify mechanisms linking exercise to cognitive change (Aim 2), we will conduct secondary analyses of behavioral, physiological, biomarker, [deleted neurophysiological], and neuroimaging data. We plan to translate our scientific findings for application in the public health sphere, by synthesizing our results in presentations and publications, which should lead to wide dissemination and implications for interventions for persons with MCI (e.g., cybercycle placement in assisted living or home environments; Aim 3).
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1 |
2016 |
Anderson-Hanley, Cay Saulnier, Emilie |
R41Activity Code Description: To support cooperative R&D projects between small business concerns and research institutions, limited in time and amount, to establish the technical merit and feasibility of ideas that have potential for commercialization. Awards are made to small business concerns only. |
Memory Lane: a Neuro-Exergame to Mitigate Cognitive Decline in Later Life @ 1st Playable Productions, Llc
? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 1st Playable Productions and Union College propose to develop a commercializable product combining physical exercise and cognitive activities through interactive gaming on a stationary bicycle to help prevent cognitive decline and dementia in older adults. The Interactive Physical and Cognitive Exercise System (iPACES) developed by Union College's Healthy Aging and Neuropsychology Lab is the first system to combine physical and cognitive interventions, and has already proven to have a greater cognitive benefit to older adults than either of these two interventions alone. While behavioral interventions are unlikely to completely prevent or halt dementia, there is the potential for synergistic physical and cognitive exercise specifically to reduce the risk of onset dementia or slow progression. Creating an affordable and easily distributed product will enable wide access to this intervention, while also furthering understanding of what combinations have biggest impact. This Phase I project includes the development of a game that combines physical and cognitive exercise, a hardware configuration that is safe for older adults and suited for in-home installation, and the further collection of user data to inform further developments in engaging design. Participants will be recruited from area retirement communities and advertising and screened for suitability. Participants are assessed after two weeks of playing the cognitive game, without exercise, then as participants engage in the full experience they are assessed at 2, 6, and 12 weeks. Normative individuals interested in maintaining brain health, patients who are prescribed iPACES to slow or ameliorate cognitive decline, retirement and assisted living communities are all potential beneficiaries of the dementia treatment. The incidence of dementia in North America is projected to nearly triple from 3.4 million cases in 2001 to 9.2 million by 2040, with a worldwide increase from 24 to 81 million over the same time period. Considering multiple causes of dementia, no known cure, and minimal benefit from medication, behavioral interventions to improve brain health are a critical component for extending quality of life for patients, families, and their support systems.
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0.904 |