Producing Research for Global Impact 2022 Research and Engagement Grant Conference

Penn One Health in Latin America: Technology-aided strategies to prevent dog-mediated human rabies 
Dr. Ricardo Castillo-Neyra, Perelman School of Medicine

A multidisciplinary team of faculty and students from Penn Medicine, Penn Vet and the Wharton School are partnering with Peruvian scientists to develop new strategies to fight dog rabies in Peru. In in most Latin American countries with mass dog vaccination campaigns, dog rabies has been controlled. However, the vaccination coverage of these official campaigns has decreased in some areas, enabling the introduction of the rabies virus in areas previously under control. In areas affected by urban rabies, free-roaming dogs are the main reservoirs. In this context, the behavior and distribution of free-roaming dogs are affected by the complex landscapes of cities, with structures influencing dogs' ecology, vaccination coverage, and ultimately rabies virus transmission. GPS tracking of dogs will allow researchers to remotely observe the movement of animals within a growing city, suffering a rabies outbreak to understand the influence of city structures on the transmission of infectious diseases. Through computational algorithms, the Penn team will develop optimized vaccination strategies to increase coverage. By integrating the study of human health, animal health and the urban environment, the Penn and Peruvian teams are applying the One Health approach to tackle an emergent and persistent public health problem.

Energy and Comfort Assessment of Mongolian Ger Dwellings
William Braham, Weitzman School of Design

With the steady urbanization of Mongolia since the 1960s, former nomads have been settled in legal, semi-formal “ger districts” at the perimeter of the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Roughly 60% of the residents of the capital live in a combination of ger ("yurt" in Russian) and self-built rigid frame houses, which burn soft coal to keep their dwellings warm, making it one of the most polluted cities in the world. This project was developed to help reduce or eliminate the combustion of coal in the ger-district. In the short term, this will support efforts to reduce coal consumption and pollution in the ger district. The longer term goal is the development of dramatically improved ger that can operate without a central stove.

There is currently no way to accurately compare the thermal performance or energy among ger, or to evaluate the effect of any improvements. The initial phase of the research was devoted to developing audit and diagnostic protocols that could be used to evaluate the thermal performance of ger. Through the first year, we imported and assembled a Mongolian ger at Pennovation, the research campus of the University of Pennsylvania, monitoring it to understand its thermal behavior and to identify opportunities to improve its comfort and energy performance. The team also obtained some temperature and other monitoring data from a selection of ger in the ger district of Ulaanbaatar to support that research, and visited a selection of ger in Ulaanbaatar to better understand their construction and operation.

The Future of U.S.-China Relations
Jacques DeLisle, Carey Law School and Neysun Mahboubi, School of Arts & Sciences

This project will convene a diverse group of leading “next generation” China scholars and analysts at Penn: first, to participate in a preliminary plenary conference in October 2019, organized around key issue areas and framing the agenda for the second phase, to draft and promote specific, actionable policy recommendations for key stakeholders in U.S. policy toward China. The project focuses on the following six key issues: National Security, Trade and Competitiveness, Technology, Human Rights, Climate and Environment, and Society and Values. The project will also hold sessions for journalists, policymakers and policy influencers in the 2020 election season.

Assessing executive functioning in Ghanaian Schoolchildren
Sharon Wolf, Graduate School of Education

Despite increased access to education in low-income countries, hundreds of millions of children worldwide reach adulthood without basic literacy and numeracy skills. Moreover, programs designed to improve educational quality in low-income countries have disproportionately focused on academic skills without also addressing important skills necessary to promote engagement and learning in the classroom. These non-academic skills include student motivation as well as Executive Function (EF) competencies like working memory, goal setting, organization, and self-monitoring.

The purpose of this study is to examine how Executive Function competencies and student motivation develop and are linked to school success in one low-income country—Ghana. The study will build on previous research done in Ghana in 2015-16 focused on how to improve the quality of early childhood education (ECE). Professor Wolf and her team will examine (1) how EFs and motivation independently and interactively predict students' academic outcomes; (2) if exposure to high-quality ECE has a long-term impact on students’ EFs and motivation skills in primary school; and (3) how existing measures of students’ home, classroom, and school environments predict EFs and motivation, as well as differences between boys and girls. Their results will inform future work to develop skills-based interventions to improve learning outcomes throughout Ghana.

Leveraging Early Adolescence for Development (LEAP) in Ghana

Early adolescence offers a key window of opportunity to support human development. Interventions during early adolescence may seize age-specific opportunities to prevent risks; bolster the effectiveness of investments made earlier in life; and mitigate damage from early-life adversity. Parenting programs are especially promising. Yet evidence on whether such programs can fulfill this potential, for which children, and through which channels, is scant, especially in low-resource settings. This project’s overall objective is to inform a deeper understanding of parents’ attitudes towards engagement in their adolescent’s education and well-being, with a gender-equity lens to understand attitudes towards children using community-based participatory research with caregivers and adolescents in four peri-urban communities in Ghana. The results will inform the adaptation of a parent engagement intervention to increase engagement and support adolescent well-being and to pilot test the program with a small group of families.

Engaging the Local Community to Study Invasive Species in the Galápagos Archipelago
Michael Weisberg (Arts & Sciences), Deena Skolnick Weisberg (Arts & Sciences), Erol Ackay (Arts & Sciences), Tim Linksvayer (Arts & Sciences)

The Galápagos Archipelago is a series of 18 large volcanic islands and a number of smaller rocks 906 km off the coast of mainland Ecuador. Famously the inspiration for many of Darwin’s ideas in Origin of Species, the islands remain an important focal point of biological work due to their relative isolation, their large number of endemic species, and their unique, fragile ecosystems. However, due to the increasing popularity of ecotourism, the growing local population on three of the islands, and changes in global climate, these fragile islands face many ecological challenges.

One of the greatest threats to these islands are invasive ants, whose impact is especially high in the settled areas. Invasive ants can outcompete and exclude native ant species, eliminate other invertebrates, and threaten vertebrates such as ground-nesting reptiles and birds. If the Galápagos is to be preserved in more-or-less its current state, current invasions must be monitored and controlled, and future invasions must be prevented. The only way to realistically accomplish this is in partnership with the local population. Although advances have been made in preventing and controlling invasion, these often take the form of protocols imposed on the community, without a lot of effort to cultivate local understanding. Our prior research suggests that this is a mistake; scientific and ecological literacy require appreciating the nature and character of the scientific research process.

This project entails a two-pronged research project in the town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, on the island of San Cristóbal: The research team will study the invasion front of bigheaded ants on San Cristóbal, and at the same time, will train local high school students in the techniques of field ecology and in scientific methodology more generally. By having local students conduct the bulk of the fieldwork, we aim to not only do high quality science, but also address problems of invasion by cultivating a deeper understanding of ecology and a deeper appreciation for science in the community.

Seeing/Hearing Globally: PGS in South Africa and Australia
Carol Muller, School of Arts and Sciences

Professor Muller has led Penn Global Seminars to South Africa and Australia. In South Africa, she and her students engage music, arts, and politics in post-apartheid South Africa, and the engagement has expanded into a Podcasting South African jazz research project. In Australia, she and her students engage indigenous knowledge, colonial history, music, arts, and land amongst Aboriginal Australians in Australia's Northern Territory.

China and Ashkenazic European Jewry: Transnational Encounters
Professor Kathryn Hellerstein, School of Arts and Sciences

The project aims to study 120 years of cultural exchange between China and Ashkenazic Jewry in Europe, Israel. By exploring the interchange between China and Ashkenazic Jewry over the past century, this project examines the depth, subtlety, and complexity of what happens when writers grapple with communicating commonality and difference and try to arrive at mutual understanding. The project focuses on important translations and on literary, ethnographic, religious, and philosophical works that have sparked cultural encounters in both directions, that is, from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, or English texts into Chinese, and from Chinese into these languages. The questions raised by project participants directly engage the larger issues of cultural exchange, influence, and translation that are of much interest and excitement in the humanities today and that are central to the larger contemporary global dialogue.

Among other deliverables, this project will convene three major interdisciplinary conferences and workshops.