As part of its strategic priority to improve research excellence, the College has made it a top priority to win more large federal grants, particularly ones that bring together faculty from different disciplines. During 2020, faculty at the College took dramatic steps toward that particular goal. The list of recipients includes (but is by no means limited to): 

• A team led by Paulo Blikstein, Associate Professor of Learning Technology Design, and Director of Teachers College’s Transformative Learning Technologies Lab (TLT Lab), which received a three-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and research a new “technological ecosystem” that will enable students to create, test and compare their own ideas about science.  Tamar Fuhrmann, Senior Research Scientist working within TC’s TLT Lab, is a co-Principal Investigator on the project. The funding — a Level 2 grant from NSF’s DRK-12 Program, which is one of the most important at the agency for STEM research — is focused on sixth- and seventh-grade science, but the results will be adaptable to other age groups, including high school students.
• TC’s Community College Research Center, which received two prestigious five-year grants from the federal Institute of Education Sciences (IES), totaling nearly $6.3 million. 

A $3.5 million IES predoctoral interdisciplinary research training grant will support doctoral training for a small group of selected Ph.D. students pursuing careers in applied research focused on post-secondary education. During the first year of the funding, the College will recruit qualified applicants. Over the following three years, the grant will fund three cohorts of five students each, covering each student’s tuition and all fees, and providing a living stipend and money to attend research conferences. Under the terms of the grant, the College will provide an additional $1.5 million in funding to the student recipients.

“We’re very pleased to be able to provide the eventual student recipients with this level of assistance, which is greater and more comprehensive than what TC has been able to provide in the past,” said Thomas Brock, CCRC Director, who is Principal Investigator on the grant together with co-PIs Aaron Pallas, Arthur I. Gates Professor of Sociology & Education, and Sarah Cohodes, Associate Professor of Economics & Education. 

A $2.8 million IES research grant will fund the first-ever comprehensive evaluation of the Federal Work-Study program, one of the nation’s oldest student aid programs, which typically provides part-time employment to undergraduate, graduate and professional students with financial need. Nongovernmental sources will provide an additional $509,000 to support the effort.

The study will be conducted with a large, urban multi-site public college system in the Northeast. Led by Judith Scott-Clayton, Associate Professor of Economics & Education, with co-PIs Brock and Adela Soliz, Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, it will assess both the short- and long-term outcomes of work-study jobs. 

• Alex Eble, Assistant Professor of Economics & Education, co-recipient of an $884,205 grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences to explore how messages about gender and race in elementary school textbooks can influence children’s beliefs in their own abilities and their subsequent educational decisions. Non-governmental sources will provide more than $133,000 in additional funds to support the effort. Eble’s partner on the two-year research project is Anjali Adukia,  Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, at the University of Chicago.
• Andrew Gordon, Professor of Movement Sciences, who, with researchers in the Robotics and Rehabilitation Laboratory (ROAR) led by Columbia mechanical engineering professor Sunil Agrawal, has received a $3 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to refine and test a robotic device that can help children with cerebral palsy (CP) to sit up and improve their upper-body control. The experimental device, called TRuST (for “Trunk Support Trainer), could help children with more severe, non-ambulatory bilateral CP, or those who walk with assistive devices.
• Erika Levy, Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD), the late Angel Wang, Professor of Deaf & Hard of Hearing (DHH) and Director of the Program in Deaf & Hard of Hearing, and Maria Hartman, Lecturer in the same program, who received a $1.24 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education that pays for students in DHH and in CSD to take a certain set of courses, attend an annual conference and obtain placements in their fields. 
• Douglas Mennin, Professor of Clinical Psychology, co-recipient of a five-year, $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a study of ERT-C, a therapy he has developed to treat severe and persistent anxiety and depression in the spouses, parents, adult children and others who take care of cancer patients. These informal caregivers (ICs), who play an increasingly crucial role in the health care system, are at even higher risk for these conditions than the cancer patients they attend, says Mennin, who is Co-Principal Investigator in the study with Allison Applebaum, Assistant Attending Psychologist and Director of the Caregivers Clinic at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City.