Two USU Faculty Members Receive NSF Grant

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to two Utah State University faculty members to geochemically and microscopically fingerprint quartzite. The NSF grant supports a collaborative research project and is coordinated through USU’s ADVANCE program.

Recipients of the $180,391 NSF grant are professors Bonnie Pitblado, department of sociology, social work and anthropology, and Carol Dehler, department of geology.

 

Prehistoric people used the stone quartzite for millennia to manufacture spear points and other stone tools. Characterizing the quartzite used to make tools will allow archaeologists to reconstruct where prehistoric people obtained their raw stone and, by extension, how they moved across landscapes through time and space throughout the world. Geologists will benefit from the ability to characterize quartzite formations across the globe.

 

According to program leader Trish Kalbas-Schmidt, ADVANCE is a National Science Foundation-funded program designed to improve the recruitment and retention of women faculty in STEM fields: the sciences, technology, engineering and math. To achieve this goal, in 2004 ADVANCE initiated collaborative seed-grant support, a program designed to boost collaborative, interdisciplinary research by female tenured and tenure-track professors in STEM departments.

 

Christine Hult, the principal investigator for the ADVANCE grant and associate dean of humanities, arts and social sciences, said the seed grant program is beginning to yield important results for Utah State, as faculty teams leverage their seed grants into significant national funding opportunities. One example of a successful seed-grant team, Pitblado and Dehler, an archaeologist and geologist respectively, received a $9,000 seed grant during the first round of competition. They used the seed grant to test six methods for profiling quartzites from unique geologic sources through analysis of trace-element composition and microscopic properties. They identified two methods that worked particularly well and used their results as the basis for the just-funded proposal to NSF.

 

“The collaborative seed-grant initiative worked just the way we had hoped it would,” said Kalbas-Schmidt. “Dr. Pitblado and Dr. Dehler leveraged a small grant from ADVANCE into an external grant 20 times larger. In the process, two USU scientists who previously did not know each other developed a close collaborative relationship that will bear fruit for years to come.”

 

Principal investigator Pitblado agreed.

 

“The ADVANCE seed-grant program enriched my academic opportunities enormously because I developed a working relationship with a colleague in another college,” she said. “On a personal level, I also gained a friend, someone who makes working at USU even better than it had previously been.”

 

Co-principal investigator Dehler stressed ways the project met the goals of USU ADVANCE.

 

“Our project crosses disciplinary and departmental boundaries, bringing datasets and people together,” she said. “Not only will these data add significant bulk to the global archaeology dataset, but they will also provide significant geochemical information for understanding the Proterozoic and younger geologic history of southern Colorado.”

 

In addition to their successful NSF proposal, Pitblado and Dehler have published two articles on their research, with a third under review at the journal “Geoarchaeology.” With students from their departments as collaborators, they have presented the results of their ADVANCE-sponsored pilot study at four national and regional archaeological and geologic conferences. Their new NSF grant includes funds for a number of additional USU student research assistants who will benefit from the opportunity to conduct and present original scientific research.

 

For information on the grant, contact Kalbas-Schmidt at (435) 797-8096.

 

 

 

Contact:  Trish Kalbas-Schmidt, (435) 797-8069,trishk@cc.usu.edu