cas: fellows 2008-2009


CAS Fellows are untenured UIUC faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. With the Professors and Associates, they form the core of the Center for Advanced Study Community. Fellows also participate in a yearly roundtable discussion of research interests and are invited to offer a future CAS presentation.




**Peter Abbamonte
physics

CONSTRUCTION OF A BEAM LINE AT THE ADVANCED PHOTON SOURCE FOR THE STUDY OF QUANTUM FRUSTRATION IN CONDENSED MATTER
One of the great intellectual challenges facing condensed matter physics is to understand the physics of materials that exhibit quantum frustration. Such materials have many exotic and potentially useful properties, including high-temperature superconductivity; but it is not yet possible to describe their ground states and elementary excitations within a single theory.

One example of quantum frustration is the doped Mott insulator. Conceptually this system consists of a two-dimensional array of electron spins on a square lattice. Each spin sits on a lattice site and interacts with its neighbors via the exchange interaction, J. If J is positive, each spin will attempt to lower its energy by pointing in a direction opposite that of each of its neighbors and/or moving to an empty lattice site. Each spin is “quantum” in the sense that it need not have purely up or down spin but could be in a superposition of the two states.

This system faces the problem of quantum frustration. It is energetically favorable for an electron to move because, as a quantum object, its kinetic energy is higher if it is forced to remain localized on one site. But there are constraints on its motion: an up spin can hop to an empty site whose neighboring spins are down; but if it hops to a site whose neighbors are up, this results in frustrated bonds. Doped Mott insulators exist in real life as high-temperature superconductors, and physicists have been unable for several decades to determine the mechanism by which these systems superconduct.

Professor Abbamonte is co-leading, with Professor Juan-Carlos Campuzano at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a research effort to better understand phenomena associated with quantum frustration. His group will construct a new beam line at the Advanced Photo Source, Argonne National Laboratory. The facility will support two experimental techniques: resonant soft x-ray scattering, for detecting ordered ground states; and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, for studying elementary excitations. During his Center appointment Professor Abbamonte will oversee the critical early stages of construction and equipment calibration.
abbamont@illinois.edu



Tami Bond
civil and environmental engineering

SYNTHESIZING URBAN AND REGIONAL DATA INTO GLOBAL EMISSION INVENTORIES
Scientists expect the earth’s climate to evolve as the result of greenhouse gas effects (warming), aerosol effects (mostly cooling), and gaseous pollutants with short lifetimes (mostly warming). The balance of these effects is estimated using global models of the atmosphere, which require inputs in the form of emission inventories, or tabulations of emitted pollutants.

In its simplest form, an emission inventory can be thought of as a sum of activity (e.g., fuel burned or miles driven) multiplied by emission intensity for each activity (e.g., grams of pollutant released per kilogram of fuel burned). The best information about human activity and emissions comes from urban or regional tabulations; global inventories, in contrast, are often created using crude assumptions. Both urban-scale and global-scale researchers agree that joint efforts are desirable, and Professor Bond is leading a research effort to synthesize urban and regional data into global emission inventories.

Her group plans to develop two new computational tools to help automate the synthesis process. The first will extract data from existing spreadsheets, databases, or documents with a minimum of specialized intervention. The second will help identify how the extracted data should be incorporated into the global emission inventory. Initially the project will work with a vehicle dataset from Thailand and an industrial-boiler dataset from China. These data were submitted in a variety of formats and will serve as test cases for the new automated interface.

Overall, Professor Bond expects that automating the interface between urban/regional datasets and global inventories will (a) improve global simulations of current aerosol and carbon monoxide emissions; (b) improve projections of future emissions; and (c) provide a way to demonstrate the climatic impact of decisions about air quality in urban areas. She plans to present her group’s results at the Better Air Quality conference in Bangkok, in November 2008.
yark@illinois.edu



Robert Brunner
astronomy

CREATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF COSMOLOGICAL COMPUTATIONAL CODES
The Lambda Cold Dark Matter Cosmology model posits that we live in a spatially flat universe that is dominated by two controlling parameters: dark energy, which drives the expansion of space; and dark matter, which drives the formation of structure. In this model, the gravitational attraction of dark matter amplifies perturbations in the matter field, forming small structures. Over time these small structures merge to form larger structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

We cannot observe dark matter directly to learn how it forms structures. Instead, scientists begin by quantifying the observed distribution of cosmic structures in the universe. The most popular approach is via correlation functions, which quantify the level of excess clustering over a random distribution. There exists an entire family of n-point correlation functions; yet most published analyses apply only to the lowest order, the 2-point correlation function.

Professor Brunner’s research group is working to change that. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, they recently performed the most precise measurement yet of the n-point, area-averaged, angular-correlation functions using first 11 million and then more than 18 million galaxies. On the analysis side, they have applied new computational technologies to speed up their cosmological algorithms by several orders of magnitude.

During his Center appointment Professor Brunner will construct the next generation of cosmological computational codes to allow definitive measurements and theoretical interpretation – for the first time – of the entire set of n-point correlation functions. The results will significantly improve our theoretical modeling of the relationships between dark matter halos, luminous galaxies, and the specific physical predictions that quantify the role of small-scale processes leading to the formation and evolution of structure.
nigdog@illinois.edu



**Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
history

FROM TICKETS TO PARADISE TO COUPONS FOR SOCIAL SECURITY: THE SACRED AND THE MUNDANE IN THE TALES OF IRANIAN VETERANS OF THE IRAG WAR
The 1980-88 war between Iran and Iraq war claimed close to one million lives on both sides of the conflict. In Iran, the war displaced four to five million people and left a legacy of collective trauma that has directly affected more than fifteen percent of the country’s population. Professor Ghamari-Tabrizi plans to examine how Iran’s veterans have expressed, maintained, and transformed their war-time experiences as they cope with the war’s residual trauma. His project follows a three-part research scheme:

The Disowned Veteran. After hostilities terminated in 1988, the Iranian government tried to reframe the war as an anomalous event best left behind. But veterans, increasingly marginalized, demanded that the war and its social costs be revisited. As a voting bloc they contributed significantly to the election of the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.

The Burdensome Veteran. Sixteen years after the war, more than 48,000 men and women still suffer from the effects of chemical weapons used by Iraqi forces; 3,800 veterans need intensive care; and 36,000 require home care and treatment with maintenance drugs. While extensive inpatient medical facilities are available to veterans, outpatient assistance remains perfunctory.

The Sick Veteran. Significantly, discussion of the war’s pervasive mental trauma remains taboo. This is partly explained by cultural norms, where mental health is held to be the responsibility of family and friends. Language used to describe war trauma is usually symbolic, and the fine arts have become one of the main outlets for veterans’ expressions of war memories and their struggles with reintegration.

Professor Ghamari-Tabrizi will review dozens of memoirs and biographies of veterans to develop these themes, conducting archival research in the Netherlands and, if possible, at the Center for War Publicity in Tehran. By the end of his Center appointment he plans to develop a book proposal.
bghamari@illinois.edu


Stephanie M. Hilger
comparative and world literature, germanic languages and literatures

THE WARRIOR AND THE TRAVELER: WOMEN IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
During her Center appointment Professor Hilger will continue her book-length examination of German literary texts that depict and re-present women as political agents in the French Revolution. Her focus is the thirty-year period following the Revolution – a time when censorship limited French writing about the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire continued the erosion of women’s rights that had begun during the Reign of Terror with the banning of women’s political clubs and the executions of important figures such as Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, and Madame Roland.

Part One of the book examines representations of the woman as warrior. In these texts, female protagonists inhabit a literal and metaphorical battlefield. Their bruised and battered bodies represent the embattled body politic and the ambiguous position of women in a time supposedly governed by the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Part Two examines representations of the female traveler, who seeks new forms of social order. The memoir of Regula Engel (Frau Oberst Engel, 1821) serves as a transition to this discussion. Engel fought alongside her husband on the battlefield and, after his death, spent the next thirty years traveling Europe and North America in search of a new home and a means of subsistence. Similarly, two fictional heroines of this period travel and ultimately emigrate to upstate New York and to Kentucky and help establish new colonies.

While it is not true that only women wrote about women in the post-Revolutionary period, Professor Hilger is testing the hypothesis that women writers of this time tried to define a space for themselves in the reconfigured body politic through their female protagonists. She will conduct archival research in Germany and Switzerland to find and add texts to this counter-canon of literature. She will also research the specific geographical and historical context from which each author wrote to understand how her political and social reality shaped her literary production.
hilger@illinois.edu


**Ping Ma
statistics

STATISTICAL MODELING FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGING OF EARTH'S DEEP INTERIOR
During his Center appointment Professor Ma aims to detect, image, and characterize Earth’s lowermost mantle structure using broadband seismograph network data. His project team has adopted a two-step strategy that applies mathematical concepts from inverse scattering and modern statistics.

Applying inverse scattering, the team has developed a generalized radon transform (GRT) of seismic wavefield data to produce common image-point gathers, which reveal multi-scale variations in elastic properties at and near the core-mantle boundary region. Then they apply an angle-dilation depth-harmonic statistical model to estimate reflectivity profiles. “The image-point gathers reveal common structure among the messy seismic waves, and are the key notion we exploit in the statistical development,” notes Professor Ma.

Professor Ma also plans to enlarge his investigation through a collaboration with Rob van der Hilst at MIT and Maarten de Hoop at Purdue. Together they will image Earth’s deep interior over much larger regions and in more detail than has been possible previously. If successful, their efforts will (a) improve on images created from existing seismic data, (b) quantify contrasts associated with interfaces inferred from the GRT imaging, and (c) use statistics and synthetic seismograms to verify theory and validate images.
pingma@illinois.edu



**Ruby Mendenhall
sociology

HOUSING POLICIES AND ECONOMIC MOBILITY: CHICAGO'S GAUTREAUX ASSISTED HOUSING PROGRAM
Nationwide, policymakers have struggled with questions of how best to invest housing resources to improve the life chances of low-income families. Should communities be developed through incentive programs such as enterprise and empowerment zones? Or should residents be offered more ways out of resource-scarce communities, by strengthening fair housing laws and funding mobility programs? During her Center appointment Professor Mendenhall will complete three papers in this area, continuing her research with the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program in Chicago.

The Gautreaux program resulted from a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision against the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The court authorized an expansive remedy that desegregated public housing in Chicago. By 1998, more than 7,100 African-American families had relocated to new neighborhoods throughout the six-county Chicago metropolitan area.

In her first paper, Professor Mendenhall will examine how context and social structures have shaped social and economic outcomes over three generations of Gautreaux families. She will use life-course theoretical concepts of agency and the importance of historical time and place to look closely at how the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, the postindustrial era, and various housing policies influenced educational and employment outcomes for Gautreaux participants, their parents (the majority of whom migrated from the South), and their children.

Her second paper will discuss the role of social networks in providing Gautreaux participants with information about jobs. Here she will use intersectional analysis and social capital as theoretical frameworks. A third paper will analyze unemployment insurance wage data for the Gautreaux participants and their children. It will look at the relationship between moving to various neighborhoods and participants’ mobility out of the lowest income quintiles. All three studies will help to describe how various housing policies influence the affected families’ economic mobility.
rubymen.illiois.edu

**Charles Roseman
anthropology

INTEGRATING GENOMES AND PHENOTYPES IN THE STUDY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
The history of human evolution can be found in the evolution of our genetic structure, and research into the human genome is opening new windows in this area. Yet it is important to understand that humans are whole organisms and not simply a very long DNA sequence. Most of the human phenotypes that interest researchers in the biomedical and evolutionary fields of study have a complex genetic and environmental basis, in that many genes and other genomic elements have contributed to producing the diversity we see today.

While some patterns of genetic evolution have resulted from natural selection, other patterns have accumulated through mutation and random genetic drift. How these genetic patterns came about and how they relate to the expression of complex phenotypes such as brain size are the subject of Professor Roseman’s research project.

During his Center appointment Professor Roseman will begin by synthesizing quantitative models of genetic and phenotypic evolution into a unified theoretical framework. The goal here is to learn how genomic regions that contribute to individual differences in a complex trait will respond when that trait is subject to natural selection. This work will partly involve the use of computer simulations to iterate a realistic initial set of conditions and produce a distribution of possible outcomes.

With the theoretical framework in place, Professor Roseman will conduct further computer simulations to test the efficacy of several established methods for exploring areas where evolution at the genetic and phenotypic levels departs from expectations. And finally, he will attempt to apply the insights gained to conduct a comparative analysis of human and nonhuman primate evolution. These new results will help describe the mode and tempo of human evolution.
croseman@illinois.edu

**Rebecca M. Stumpf
anthropology

SOCIAL AND SEXUAL MATURATION IN WILD CHIMPANZEES
Because chimpanzees are the closest living relative of humans, their sexual and social development provides a valuable comparative perspective for human adolescent development. Through her research with chimpanzees, Professor Stumpf plans to develop a plausible model for the maturation of our human ancestors; gain increased insight into human behavior; and identify possible selective pressures on hominin sexual maturation, and consequently human evolution.

The research project focuses on a developmental characteristic shared by chimpanzees and humans: males become fertile at the beginning of puberty, while females develop secondary sexual characteristics long before becoming fertile. It’s possible that among chimpanzee females this subfertile period allows them to (a) mature socially and sexually without the costs of pregnancy and/or (b) avoid inbreeding before they transfer into a new community. The proximate behavioral and hormonal mechanisms stimulating females to transfer are currently unknown. It’s especially important to understand this phenomenon because females, with their low reproductive output, are the limiting resource for changes in population size and thus the central element in population dynamics.

Professor Stumpf will conduct her research with the Kanyawara community of chimpanzees in the Kibale Forest of Uganda. This community currently consists of 10 adult males, 16 adult females, and 23 offspring. It has been studied since 1987, and long-term records are available. Stumpf will supplement these records with behavioral and hormonal data she will collect for 20 chimpanzees (age 5-19) over a three-year period.

Previously Professor Stumpf’s data-collection has been limited to summer breaks – a time when African habitats are drier, and the chimpanzees are more dispersed and less social. Now she can use the release time from her CAS appointment to collect data during the crucial periods of increased sociality among the chimpanzees.
rstumpf@illinois.edu

Deke Weaver
art and design

THE UNRELIABLE BESTIARY: A SOLO PERFORMANCE WITH VIDEO
Professor Weaver likes a good story. His performance-theater relies on the idea that a tale with emotional punch has transformative power. He writes; he performs what he writes; and he creates videos for performances and installations. Haunting and funny, his performances interweave monologs and videos, often building and layering meaning with the forward motion of prose and the free-associative vertical depth of poetry.

During his Center appointment Professor Weaver will develop a new project titled The Unreliable Bestiary. A bestiary – common during the Middle Ages - was an illustrated book of real and mythic animals, usually accompanied by a moral lesson and informed by the belief that every living thing has a special meaning. Fueled by our precarious moment in the natural world, the project will include a series of interdisciplinary solo performances set in unusual venues (zoos, aquariums, rodeo rings, circus tents, beaches, and national park amphitheaters) – an event for each letter of the alphabet.

He envisions a provocative look through the lens of the Animal at environmental, social, and spiritual concerns. “We are becoming increasingly isolated from the physical world,” he notes. “We think we know where our destiny lies and how the story ends. We don’t.”

Weaver plans to draw on technical knowledge he gained recently through video experimentation with the Theatre Department’s Scenic Technology Group. The experience stretched his sense of how large-scale, multi-screen projections could work, and he plans to incorporate this knowledge into Bestiary. He hopes to present the new piece in 2009.
dekew@illinois.edu

**These faculty members have been recommended for appointment as Beckman Fellows in the Center for Advanced Study named for the donor of a gift that permits additional recognition for outstanding younger Fellow candidates who have already made distinctive scholarly contributions.