The University of Oregon Foundation’s Trustee Excellence Fund supports scholarly activity undertaken by UO faculty, staff, and students. The fund has awarded three initiatives with approximately $50,000 each this fiscal year, one in response to a 2023 application submission and the other two resulting from proposals submitted in spring 2024.
This seed grant mechanism funds faculty, staff, or students from any discipline undertaking high-impact research, scholarship, or creative activities.
“These two awards to the faculty represent a high potential for scholarly and social impact,” said Anshuman “AR” Razdan, vice president for research and innovation. “Both projects will involve graduate students and therefore fulfill an important objective of the UO Foundation’s program. I want to thank the UO Foundation trustees for continued support of our faculty.”
The Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation administers this grant program in collaboration with the UO Foundation.
“The Trustee Excellence Fund was established in 2015 to support emerging and impactful opportunities at the University of Oregon,” said Paul Weinhold, president and CEO of the UO Foundation. “We are proud to continue to foster innovation and excellence within our community and are especially excited to announce our three new awardees. We are confident their work will have positive impact, not only at the UO, but throughout the broader societal, academic, and creative landscapes.”
One award will go to Nicole Giuliani, an associate professor in the special education and counseling psychology department and member of the Prevention Science Institute. Her project will investigate the role that parent fear plays in restrictive child feeding. Many parents of young children restrict what and how much food their child eats in an attempt to improve child health, yet use of this practice is associated with negative outcomes including increased consumption of nutrient-poor foods, disordered eating, and weight gain. Several psychosocial factors are associated with the use of restrictive feeding, including parents’ experience of weight-based discrimination and parent lack of control around food. This research is essential to creating supportive, effective interventions that help reduce the negative emotions underlying restrictive child feeding. This project involves training doctoral student, Maria Iakovidis.
Another will support Lynn Stephen, a Philip H. Knight Chair and professor in the anthropology department. For her project, she will document the presence and use of Mesoamerican languages in Oregon and Mesoamerican healing knowledge, resulting in open-access digital humanities tools (map, database, and testimonies) that serve both Oregon’s Mesoamerican communities and the agencies that seek to assist them. These tools are developed in collaboration with Kate Thornhill of the UO Libraries. This project will have an immediate impact in providing relevant linguistic, language use, cultural, and healing information for schools, health services, municipalities, and many public service providers. It will also train two doctoral students, Lidia Munoz Paniagua and Liesl Cohn de Leon, and integrate Indigenous language data and knowledge into Stephen’s undergraduate course, Immigration and Farmworkers.
A third grant was awarded in December of 2023 to Ernesto Javier Martínez, professor in the Indigenous, race, and ethnic studies department, for his film project La Serenata. He co-wrote and co-produced a 100-minute, live-action feature film with the award-winning director/producer Adelina Anthony and Oscar- and Grammy-nominated composer Hector Pérez. The story follows two parents who struggle with their beloved Mexican musical tradition when their young son requests to sing a love song to another boy, ushering them into a larger community battle for justice. This award is the result of Javier Martínez’s 2023 application to the UO Foundation, whose trustees offered to provide a $50,000 challenge grant to help him fundraise the remaining $100,000 needed to support the film’s production costs. Last fall, he secured $101,813 through UO internal awards and 322 individual donors to receive the final $50,000 from the UO Foundation.
The Trustee Excellence Fund awards will support these projects for a two-year period. Foundation staff anticipate funding a new grant cycle in 2025.
— By Catherine Jarmin Miller, Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation