Jane Maienschein - US grants

The United States, by virtually any measure, is the world leader in biology. How it achieved this preeminence is a significant aspect of Dr. Maienschein's study. During the period from 1880 to 1915, work in the life sciences in the United States underwent a significant maturing process, becoming self-consciously modern, productive and explicitly biological as well as uniquely American in some respects. Four individuals, Edmund Beecher Wilson, Edwin Grant Conklin, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Ross Granville Harrison, played central roles in establishing strong and successful research programs which attracted international attention and graduate student interest. Each of the four became a leader in establishing major biological societies, journals, and research funding foundations. They tried to hire each other and retained strong ties beginning with their graduate student days at Johns Hopkins. Yet they generated divergent programs in developmental biology: Wilson in cytology at Columbia, Conklin in experimental evolution in Princeton, Morgan in genetics at Columbia, and Harrison in experimental embryology at Yale. Dr. Maienschein is focusing on those four individuals and on their changing research programs, thereby also examining the process of scientific change at this critical time in the rise to preeminence of American biology.

Our legal system often requires decision-making. Judges and legislators must often resolve, address, or intelligently incorporate into policy, scientific issues that are themselves hotly debated by knowledgeable scientists. How can we best adjudicate competing scientific claims consistently with democratic values? An historian/philosopher of science, Jane Maienschein, a lawyer, Daniel Strouse, and a biologist, James Collins, have organized this conference in order to formulate a research agenda on questions of how conflicting scientific claims are resolved in a constitutional democracy. Traditionally, scholars in science studies, law, and political philosophy have lacked a common perspective. They have different conceptions of evidence and different approaches to resolution. Nonetheless, the issues overlap all these disciplines and the scientific. legal, and political communities in which such conflict resolution currently proceeds also overlap. Indeed, legal systems and scientific development seem to be central to establishing and stabilizing democracies. Consequently, we need an interdisciplinary study of the adjudication of competing scientific claims in the context of such democratic systems. This workshop promises to develop a research agenda for such interdisciplinary study by identifying researchable questions, promising approaches, and available opportunities. Experts from law, biology, philosophy, the social and behavioral sciences, and history will gather to be held in Phoenix Arizona March 24 and 25 to develop this research agenda.

Maienschein Developmental biology has recently celebrated its centenary as a specialty within biology. The problems that were set forth at its creation, however, remain to be answered today. Far from being discouraged, however, developmental biology is, according to a centenary report in Science magazine, "basking in its prime. Indeed the excitement and promise of the field have never been greater, as researchers close in on the secret of how a single fertilized egg cell goes through the complex and beautifully orchestrated series of changes that create and entire organism." Under this grant, Dr. Maienschein is analyzing the changing ways the central issues of development have been addressed over the past century. Against a background of similar questions that these biologists were trying to answer, Dr. Maienschein is looking at how the significantly different details in approaches, methods, techniques, and different basic assumptions have pushed and pulled researchers in a variety of directions. She is focusing on issues of morphogenesis (how structural changes develop) in particular, and on the changing concepts of "organization" which have underpinned many of the discussions. Spotlighting and comparing selected examples illuminate the way the debates have shifted and some of the underlying epistemological assumptions that have accompanied the shifts. In this project, Dr. Maienschein will test the hypothesis that there have existed competing styles of thinking within this biological community. In particular, she argues, there emerge epistemic styles, each sharing fundamental epistemological assumptions about what will count as knowledge and how to warrant knowledge claims. These epistemic styles define and direct the scientific work and are contextually embedded, while those in each group share patterns of basic assumptions about the nature of science.

The history, philosophy, and social studies of science too often operate in a vaccum,
separate from the public realms that they study. The policy-making and decision-making
worlds often need the perspectives these fields offer, but may not even know how to
discover the possible connections. We propose a workshop to develop a network of scholars
who will generate a working document that identifies existing research, opportunities, and
challenges for these fields in the public realm. We will also begin communication with
the policy analysts and develop a plan for extending these discpiplinary efforts into the
wider disciplinary and public realms.

Project Abstract
SES 0328634


This project, undertaken as a post-doctorate by Kristin Johnson under the sponsorship of Jane Maienschein, will examine the entomologist Karl Jordan's work as an internationalist during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on his experiences with the unorganized state of entomology as a discipline at the turn of the century and with the disruptive effects of nationalism in science, Karl Jordan founded the first International Congress of Entomology in 1910. He guided the congresses over the course of the next four decades, leading the recovery of both entomological friendships and meetings after the first and second world wars. His persistence was inspired not only by his firm belief in the congresses as important to the success of entomology, but the internationalist belief that scientists could lead the way toward peace and unity in all human affairs. But as Jordan brought entomologists together at international congresses, the diverse range of priorities, methods, and traditions present among natural history work became apparent. And entomologists from nations involved in tense political confrontations with each other often found it more than difficult to leave their feelings as members of nations outside the walls of the congress venues. It has been one of the fundamental tenets of science that the search for knowledge about the natural world is a task beyond politics and creed, and science has indeed been the source of interaction, exchange, and friendships between nationals for centuries. But examinations by historians of science of the impact of nationalism and world politics on science have demonstrated the falsity behind assumptions of scientific purity. Historical studies of internationalism and the effect of the world wars and the cold war on scientists. International networks have primarily focused on the physical sciences. This project will examine the ways in which the life sciences are different by looking closely at the contributions of Karl Jordan to the internationalization of science. Jordan hoped that his colleagues would not only improve the state of entomology by these occasional international meetings, but also, as scientists involved in the search for truth, show the rest of the world how to put differences aside in favor of cooperation. An analysis of the historical context of Jordan and his colleagues' successes and failures in these endeavors will provide a valuable study of the constant interplay between science and society, and how the cultural, social, and political context in which participants live influences the history of scientific disciplines. The project will take place at Arizona State University, where co-PI Kristin Johnson will work with the growing community of historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science directed by Jane Maienschein, who will take responsibility as PI for providing institutional support and a lively intellectual community for this project. Under Maienschein's leadership, Arizona State University is currently reorganizing the Life Sciences into a School of Life Sciences. The new School will house the Human Dimensions of Biology, including a new Center for Biology and Society also directed by Maienschein. That Center will include growing History and Philosophy of Science, Biology and Society, Bioethics, and Law programs. The HPS community consists of ten Ph.D. trained scholars pursuing research the life sciences or closely related fields. In addition, ASU has great strengths in the natural historical and field sciences and in systematics, with rich insect collections and related research programs. It is an ideal place for this study, which will result in at least two papers on international science and a full-length biography of Karl Jordan as an international biologist.

For the HSD initiative, Embryo research provides a case study of rapidly changing science within radically contested contexts. As with any science, embryo research is embedded in webs of unsettled ethical, legal, political, religious, cultural, and social negotiations that shape the conduct of science, its diverse meanings, and the spectrum of decisions built upon such understandings. Embryo research starts with a scientific drive to understand development of the individual organism and is shaped by three clusters of factors: (1) technical, including experimental techniques, equipment, and the way results are presented (in publications and presentations) and represented (in images and models); (2) actors, laboratory settings, institutions, and local contexts of scientific and technical work; and (3) social/cultural/ intellectual/economic environments in which the work is done. These clusters of Technical, Actors/Places, and Social/Cultural all impact and are impacted by the science. Understanding each requires different disciplinary research approaches, and understanding interactions requires multi-disciplinary research strategies and methods. The factors combine to serve as "Agents of Change" shaping science in society. This project explores those agents of scientific change in a dynamic, interactive, integrative, interdisciplinary, international research environment. With regards to Intellectual Merit, we will accomplish two major intellectual goals. First is a rich understanding of the history and current state of embryo research, the factors involved, and the multiple contexts in which research is done. Because of the importance of embryo research, this is of powerful intellectual value itself. Furthermore, in bringing together multiple otherwise disparate areas of study related to this particular case, we will achieve a much richer understanding of the Agents of Change influencing each case of scientific change. Our hypotheses focus on selected episodes in which different factors had different relative importance, and we seek to analyze and understand the Agents of Change over time. All results will be part of the digital working environment of the Virtual Laboratory (VL) in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. We will archive research materials to be shared among different working teams, and will add scholarly interpretive essays and articles that will make up an on-line Resource Collection accessible to multiple users, in addition to traditional scholarly publications. With regards to Broader Impacts, this project has a several: (1) Working with a network of nearly 2 dozen collaborators in 6 countries and multiple disciplines, we will develop a true "collaboratory." By sharing materials and research questions, we will ask new questions within each discipline and learn of research materials, questions, and interpretations across disciplines. (2) The VL tested digital working environment makes that research possible by making all research materials and scholarly interpretations available to all users at all times. (3) The research will allow us to demonstrating how Agents of Change affect this case of Embryo Research in its societal contexts, including interpretations of the emerging patterns shaping science and societal decisions. This should also inform future decisions processes and policy-making. (4) In the final stages, we will develop Educational Materials for multiple user groups. A Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate Student, and Undergraduates will all be members of the research team, and each will be trained individually while helping to add to the accumulating community results.

Introduction: This proposal is for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Biology and Society in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. The purpose of the fellowship is to expand the Co-PI's dissertation research, which is on the ecologist, environmentalist, and public figure L. C. Birch. The plan is to encompass contemporary and historical interactions among three central branches of modern biology - ecology, systems biology, and ethology - including their philosophical and social dimensions, while remaining centered on Birch and his work, influences, and impacts. The expansion beyond the dissertation will include Birch-like research and engagement with larger communities. The ultimate goal is to enable the Co-PI to acquire a deeper and broader understanding of Birch's work and vision.

Intellectual Merit: ASU is uniquely positioned to broaden these investigations. The School has dedicated emphases in organismal, integrative, and systems biology and in ecology, evolution, and environment. In addition, it is organized to facilitate collaborative work pursued across disciplines. The Co-PI's primary investigation will center on the theoretical and methodological connections among ecology, systems biology, and ethology not only in current research programs but also historically, tracing back the intertwined development of these three fields to their emergence in the early part of the 20th century. Using ASU's resources in science-society relations, the Co-PI will also investigate the social and cultural contexts in which these closely related fields were shaped.

Broader Impacts: Beyond the primary research phase, the Co-PI will also work with the NSF-funded Embryo Project to examine current and past embryo studies, the use of embryos in experiments, and the social and cultural ramifications of the embryo as technology for improving life. In both the Embryo Project seminars and several team-teaching opportunities in the School's courses on Science and Society, the Co-PI plans to further develop historical and contemporary connections between biological research and the social sphere, addressing topics such as government policy, institutional support, public perception, and interface with religion/culture.

This STS training and research project is supported by the Impacts of Biology on Society (IBS) initiative, which is jointly funded by NSF's BIO and SBE directorates.

The project will provide rigorous interdisciplinary training and research for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a focus on developmental biology. The program will involve graduate students at Arizona State University (ASU) as well as visiting students from other universities. Participants will receive training in interdisciplinary scholarly research in history and philosophy of science; in addition, they will receive training on digital curating and database managing.

The research theme for this training and research project is provided by the Embryo Project, an ongoing project in history and philosophy of developmental biology at ASU's Center for Biology and Society. The Embryo Project explores historical, philosophical, bioethical, legal, and social aspects of developmental biology and its relations to society, all with a solid grounding in developmental biology and its historical development. It pursues these goals through a set of focused projects directed by individual faculty members at the Center for Biology and Society.

The Intellectual Merits of this IBS supported training and research project lie with research focused on projects within the history and philosophy of developmental biology. Each member of the training group will play a defined role building upon and beyond existing strengths. Each student will develop a focused research project related to individual career directions, and based on that will write a set of related articles to be submitted for review, editing, and publication in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia.

The project's Broader Impacts include the participants learning to communicate research results effectively to multiple user groups, and helping to develop contributions targeted toward K-12 teachers and the broader public, and will take advantage of ASU's outreach activities "Ask a Biologist" and "Chain Reaction." The team-based approach makes it possible for each student to excel in a targeted area while also participating in all other aspects of the project, including outreach.

Introduction

This award provides support for the first part of an ambitious collaborative informatics project between researchers at Arizona State University and the informatics team at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (MBL). The full project involves three parts and will lead to informatics infrastructure and training that will be available to the entire STS (Science, Technology, and Society) community. This award provides seed money that will serve to support the first part of the project, which is described in the next section. In the second part, the team will build a centralized repository and adapt and develop informatics tools to allow the History Project to develop new kinds of scholarly data and knowledge. The repository will integrate the MBL History Project into a single, shared resource growing from the repository containing other projects that already reside at the MBL. In the third part, the team will develop a research system to allow any STS researchers to add their materials into the repository (with ownership and intellectual property carefully labeled and protected), then take advantage of participating in a shared system for which each researcher has access to all, and be able to ask new research questions and develop new knowledge as a result. To foster these approaches the team will also develop an education infrastructure for STS informatics.

Intellectual Merit

Scholars will develop new research approaches and findings within the MBL History Project, which brings together existing materials related to biology at the MBL and provides scholarly interpretations of the science, the institution, and its place in society. The MBL has been one of the world's leading biological research and education institutions for over 120 years, and it has had tremendous impact on the life sciences and on society. The team will assemble working groups around four topics: Embryology, Model Organisms, Physiology, and Ecosystems. A team leader has been identified for each working group, and each of them will bring together a small group to help identify materials that will be collected and ingested into the database. These will be combined with materials gathered through MyMBL, an online tool that the team is developing for collecting digital video narratives from living subjects on specific topics; the development of MyMBL is to be supported by this award. Additional (more technical) infrastructure elements are also to be supported, such as the development of a d-space repository for maintaining information in triples that are to be imported from some Fedora databases. All of these elements will serve to provide a "proof of principle" for the full project outlined in the first section above.

Potential Broader Impacts

The impacts of the first part of the project include the scholarly results of the MBL History Project, centered on the repository and Web interface plus more traditional scholarly interpretive publications and presentations. Some steps will be taken to develop the repository and tools that will eventually make research results available through several different Web interfaces to multiple user groups, from scholars to the wider public, including educators and students; undergraduate and graduate students will be able to contribute articles, building on successful existing models. Finally, the informatics team will continue developing plans for offering Informatics Training courses and materials in order to make the shared repository as useful as possible for the STS community and more broadly.

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Science, Technology, and Society Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and by the Advances in Biological Informatics Program in the Division of Biological Infrastructure in the Directorate for Biological Sciences.

Intellectual Merit

This will be the first large scale computational project in Science and Technology Studies. Although the focus of this project is on Biodiversity and on History and Philosophy of science, the approach would extend well beyond these areas. The project will establish a repository and a research system based on computational tools and digital sources, and it will develop education and training modules. The goal is to move beyond separate small collections that reside on individual computers in dispersed places, and bring together the objects of study as well as scholarly interpretations of those objects. The materials are to be openly available for efficiency and also to stimulate new kinds of research and discovery. The repository will link to existing large and widely-used databases such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopedia of Life. Researchers at Arizona State University and the Marine Biological Laboratory will collaborate in bringing together the robustly integrative methods that combine history and philosophy of science, informatics, and biology of biodiversity. It will transform the way that scholarship and training is done in the areas, and lead to a new kind of scientific history based in open access publishing. The repository, tools, and training modules will be widely available for other projects in Science and Technology Studies for the full range of STEM disciplines.

Potential Broader Impacts

This project will produce scholarly results, a repository, informatics tools, and training manuals for others to customize and contribute their own projects. Scholarly results are to be produces that would be available through different websites for multiple user groups, from specialized scholars to the wider public. For educators and students, the project will connect with Arizona State University's Ask A Biologist project, as well as to Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and to other existing databases. Undergraduate and Graduate students will be trained to contribute interpretive articles. Informatics Training courses, manuals, and other educational approaches will make the system and repository available widely.

Introduction

This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports research in the history of evolutionary ecology. Specifically, it will investigate attempts to integrate models of adaptive phenotypic plasticity into ecological models of species distribution. The project will focus on how specific social, intellectual, and material contexts in which models of plasticity emerged during the 1960s through 1980s shaped their underlying assumptions and commitments. The grant will support travel to multiple sites to retrieve oral histories and to consult specific archival materials that are essential for reconstructing the influential conceptual and theoretical approaches to investigating adaptive phenotypic plasticity.

Intellectual Merit

This project will illuminate an important interface between science and society by placing developments in evolutionary ecology in the context of shifting societal visions of environmental connectivity, vulnerability, and anthropogenic change. It will create new bridges between the history of ecology, environmental history, and the history of genetics and molecular biology, by showing how different visions of environmental change are linked to ideas about genetic mechanisms in ecological and evolutionary processes. It will also contribute to our understanding of trans-disciplinary knowledge transfer by describing the consequences of efforts to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches from ecology and evolutionary biology.

Broader Impacts

By analyzing the complex relationships between theoretical models and empirical research in contextualized investigative settings, this project can generate insights that are highly transferrable to studies of the role and status of models in other scientific fields. In addition, this project has potential to transform the way that scientists think about the broader social and intellectual contexts of their research; the researcher plans to engage ecologists and policy-makers via presentations at scientific meetings, publications in scientific journals, and transdisciplinary workshops. Finally, the results of this project will be used to create educational materials that illustrate science as a practice.

Introduction

This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports an investigation in the history of cell degeneration research. The dissertation focuses on four historical episodes from the 1930s to 1990s. The first three episodes are largely written in draft form. This grant will support research on the fourth historical episode documenting H. Robert Horvitz's study of cell death in the nematode C. elegans from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Horvitz, a molecular biologist, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two others. This current proposal requests funding mostly for archival visits and interviews to characterize the fourth historical episode through the early 1990s when Horvitz represented cell death as a specific cellular state of differentiation caused by a network of gene expressions. This development opened the door for future genomic approaches to cell death, aging as well as cancer research through studying the model organism C. elegans.

Intellectual Merits

The specific study supported by this grant and the encompassing dissertation research will serve to provide an analytical account of the emergence of diverse meanings of cell degeneration, such as being a protector of health, a sculptor for development, and a limitation of lifespan, in the contexts of these research programs and broader biomedical concerns. The study will contribute to deeper understandings of the complex history of biomedical research including insights about scientific practice and connections with broader historical backdrops and consequences. The study will also contribute to discussions in history and philosophy of science and science studies on the roles of new biological material, research styles, and priorities in the modern development of biology, especially with the intricate interplay between changing experimental systems and concepts of cell degeneration these systems embodied.

Broader Impacts

History of science projects that contextualize and problematize current knowledge and research programs on a particular topic, in this case cell degeneration, are of substantial interest to scientists in the field (cell biology) and related fields (such as molecular biology, physiology, cancer research, and research on aging). In addition, the results of this project are to be communicated to the public through the online encyclopedia of embryology, the Embryo Project, through an online virtual exhibition about history of biology of aging at the Marine Biological Laboratory Repository, and through a prize-winning podcast by Chemical Heritage Foundation, Distillations.

This is a proposal for a multi-faceted STS study by an interdisciplinary research team to explore the conservation mission of zoos and aquariums focusing on the evolution of the shifting responsibilities of these institutions to animals and to conservation. The team will engage in an ambitious and integrated program of research, conferences, public events, and the development of teaching materials focused on the complex, contested, and changing roles of zoos and aquaria in society.

There is a dual emphasis on engaging the scientific/professional community and the general public, which not only enables the integration of diverse viewpoints, but also serves as a mechanism for increasing public awareness of the goals, tactics, and challenges of zoo conservation. With regards to the public component, the researchers plan to have a broad impact in two distinct ways; the events will take place in different geographic regions (Arizona, New York), and there will be a virtual public exhibit that will be accessible worldwide.

This award will fund a workshop that will bring together key members of the STS community to engage in intensive discussions about data management issues. The need for the meeting is initially driven by a recent requirement implemented by NSF; each research proposal is now required to have a suitably adequate data management plan. The requirement is generally formulated; NSF recognizes that there is a vast array of scientific research cultures with differing practices of data management. Moreover, these many such cultures (including STS) address pertinent data-management issues in widely different ways. Issues include what constitutes data, and how data should be characterized, formatted, securely stored, and made broadly accessible for re-use by others, while also addressing concerns of privacy and the need at times to grant only limited access. The workshop will focus on articulating current needs, as well as proposed responses and solutions, for development of effective data management principles and routines in the STS domain.

The workshop organizers have four distinct goals: (1) to generate provisional templates for data management plans for individual projects across the diverse fields of STS. (2) To produce a workshop report that summarizes the discussions with a focus on current and future needs and existing and possible solutions (including the templates); the report will be made broadly available on an existing secure, open-access repository at Arizona State University. In addition, they will produce two white papers. One white paper is (3) to be circulated to members of the STS community and to other research communities through professional societies to solicit input and work toward a shared understanding of infrastructural needs. Another white paper will (4) outline opportunities for computational work that will become possible only if the communities establish robust data management strategies; it will outline future strategies for taking advantage of opportunities for computational work in the diverse STS fields represented that is predicated on available and accessible data. The white papers will address how STS fields can implement strategies of data driven science and will consider what benefits would accrue from doing so.

General Audience Summary

This project will study the history of biological research at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The goal of the project is to analyze and interpret how biological science has evolved at MBL. The PI and a team of graduate students will spend nine weeks in each of two summers to carry out research on site at MBL, working with scientists serving as volunteer consultants to document and interpret its history. The group has identified four focal areas: embryology, cell biology, neurobiology, and ecosystems/biodiversity. These areas were chosen for several reasons: they are of currently particular strengths at the MBL, they have been identified for further development, and they have particularly rich historical materials available for study. The primary goal is to analyze those materials in the context of other research sources to produce traditional scholarly narratives as well as innovative digital exhibits that interpret the history of biology at MBL. Using an existing repository and developing digital exhibits that bring together and link all the existing information on each defined topic in one place, the project will make research materials and interpretative essays accessible to all users. In addition, the project will train graduate students in ways to bring together traditional historical research with innovative digital and computational methods.

Technical Summary

The team will begin with these driving questions: What biological research has been done at MBL? What research has been done because of MBL? How has that research changed over time, and for what reasons? And how has that research helped shape the history of biology more generally? During two summers working intensely at MBL, the team will address these questions first by collecting, collating, and curating research materials; and then by interpreting and analyzing these materials. The goal is not to produce a standard or complete institutional history but rather to focus on uniquely MBL contributions, looking especially at scientific practices and the way MBL has worked to break down traditional boundaries and transcend disciplines, institutions, and ranks. The research materials as well as the research products will be made available through open access, open source and Creative Commons licensing so that they are sustainable and easily accessible for all. The project builds on strong existing digital and computational infrastructure that provides functionality and sustainability and is part of a large scale digital and computational research system and repository developed with other funding from NSF, Arizona State University, and other sources.

This award supports the development of an international Research Coordination Network (RCN) for developing computational and big data methods for history and philosophy of science (HPS) research. Such research is beginning to yield novel insights from individual projects. However, an integrated approach is required in order to take full advantage of these methods. The RCN will take some of the steps that are necessary to eventually provide a structured representation of HPS knowledge and the foundation for a data driven computational HPS infrastructure. Given the diversity of contexts, questions, and approaches, it is clear that integration, coordination and standards cannot be imposed centrally, meaning that an RCN is the pertinent mechanism for this type of project. By establishing a new integrative approach to computational and data-driven HPS, the RCN will in turn facilitate an integration of HPS with big-data and data-driven science. In addition, the RCN will lead to new types of questions facilitated by this approach, and thereby increase the relevance of HPS for larger questions at the intersection between science and society. It will also facilitate international collaborations and the inclusion of a diverse group of scholars, particularly many younger scholars; it will do so by promoting commitment to open source, open access, and open education thereby providing broader access to and participation in the HPS community, including members of the general public.

Without coordinated authorities and ontologies, data cannot be shared or integrated across individual projects, severely limiting their broader use. Without the benefits of such an economy of scale the transformative impact of computational methods in HPS is limited as the integration and computational analysis of datasets across multiple projects is precisely what enables novel and innovative questions. This RCN addresses the challenges related to authorities and ontologies for computational and digital projects in HPS by conducting research and developing computational solutions for mapping authorities and integrating ontologies across HPS projects through step-wise aggregation and mapping of data models, authorities and ontologies. The international RCN will (1) solidify a working social/organizational network of researchers in computational HPS, including a structured set of educational modules; (2) coordinate research and development of software solutions to address the challenge of data integration across HPS projects; and (3) document and analyze the process of reaching these solutions and integration as an example of how the computational turn affects the development of scientific fields.

This award supports the research of a post-doctoral fellow on a history of biology project that focuses on a variety of different ideas of cooperation that developed during the interwar period (1919-1939). His primary goal is to understand what motivated the work that emphasized cooperation, as well as the nature of that work. He will do so using a set of driving questions and a research plan that utilizes three approaches, which are indicated below. Among the questions that he will pursue are the following. What was cooperation-oriented thinking? To what extent and in what ways was there a shared focus on cooperation and related ideas? What terms in addition to "cooperation" capture this thinking? What motivated researchers to study the biological nature and significance of cooperation during this particular historical period? How did the ideas develop over time, and are there unique features that characterize this period? The results of this project are to be disseminated through both traditional and digital publications, at conferences, and in classrooms. They will be aimed at scientists, scholars, and the general reading public. The postdoc will use his extensive training and experience in digital history to design a blog that showcases pertinent documents, photographs, stories, and novelties that arise out of this project. This website will introduce users to previously overlooked aspects of American biology and international relations.

A working hypothesis of the project is that although biologists during the interwar period used different labels for cooperative behavior including holism, unity, emergence, and organicism, they shared a common underlying goal; namely, to provide a biological explanation for cooperation, of how parts come together as coordinated wholes. The postdoc plans to focus on a specific facet of this goal by examining how this generation of biologists across different fields advanced theories about the evolution and nature of sociality and cooperation (as opposed to competition). His primary goal is to understand how and why these biologists devoted enormous effort and energy to better understanding the origin of social impulses. He will do so by engaging in a close study of the scientific, social, cultural, and political details of the period to obtain a deeper understanding of the ideas of cooperation. He will use archival research, computational methods, and interactions with current researchers in biosocial systems to bring to light what biologists are saying about cooperation today to compare ideas of cooperation across two different time frames; the comparison can both inform the historical study and inform current conceptions.

As part of a larger effort to understand fundamental rules of life, this project aims to make hybrid cells with living and artificial parts in order to ask how cellular organelles function together as modular units. Cells contain diverse organelles that play specific roles and interact with other functional units. By developing hybrids of living cells with synthetic parts (cyborgs), this project provides an innovative approach to understand modularity. Immediate goals are to develop artificial cytoskeletons to allow control of cell shape and organization upon command, offering insights into basic cellular processes. This project also examines societal impacts to inform the team's researchers and to help prepare public presentations to increase broader impacts. This work should spark public discussion on the role of hybrid organisms in society and will examine public concerns of producing something 'unnatural.' Additional impacts include training a highly interdisciplinary research team, with intensive mentoring in each group and across groups. The topic will engage the public and provide opportunity for numerous outreach projects and public events.

How cellular processes can be explained by modularity remains poorly understood, partly because of the lack of tools for manipulating whole organelles. The project focuses on developing two types of artificial cytoskeletons (synCyto) that can be introduced into living cells and controlled experimentally, based on: 1) Spirostomum myonemes and (2) Magnetic particles (Magnetic Robotic Swarms). The prediction is that these will form dynamic assemblages inside of cells that can be controllable experimentally through inputs such as light or magnetic fields to change cell shape and move other organelles. This work provides proof of principle towards developing hybrid cells with multiple synthetic organelles. Such synthetic organelles promise to provide prosthetic function to replace or augment native organelles, and have the potential to confer new and enhanced cellular functions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This project elucidates how the size of the nucleus in the cell is determined. It has been appreciated for over a hundred years that nuclear size scales with cell size, so that larger cells have larger nuclei. As cells grow, the nucleus grows at the same rate. This size scaling relationship is one of the fundamental rules of life, but the mechanisms responsible for nuclear size regulation are still poorly understood. Deciphering such mechanisms will give insights into why it is important for cells to regulate nuclear size and will provide general principles of how size regulation of cells and organelles is accomplished. In general, this work will add to our knowledge of fundamental cellular processes that are used to build living cells. As a broader outcome, this project will introduce to the larger public the importance of physical forces and quantitative measurements in cell biology research through development of educational modules and a scientific exhibit. <br/><br/>In this project, a quantitative model for nuclear size scaling will be developed. This model proposes that nuclear size is specified by physical factors such as osmotic pressure and membrane tension. Specifically, nuclear size may be determined largely by a balance of colloid osmotic pressures within the nucleoplasm and cytoplasm, which are determined by the numbers of osmotically active macromolecules present in each compartment. The general approach is to use theoretical modeling coupled with quantitative experiments on the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model organism. In S. pombe, the nucleus behaves as an “ideal osmometer” whose size corresponds quantitatively to its osmotic environment. This model will be tested in experiments in which physical parameters such as osmotic pressure are varied. The mechanism of nuclear size homeostasis in which abnormal nuclear sizes are gradually corrected will be elucidated. Mechanisms that couple nuclear volume growth and nuclear envelope surface area will be examined. This osmotic model of nuclear size promises to greatly impact the general understanding of organelle size regulation.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.