Wendy Maragh Taylor, Associate Dean of the College for Student Growth and Engagement, and Leora Gansworth, Assistant Professor of Native American Studies, are the co-project leads for a new Capacity-Building Grant from the Educating Character Initiative (ECI), a project of The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. ECI offers these Capacity-Building Grants to “provide institutions with the time, resources, and support to discern how character education works best in their context.”

Robin Belton, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, received a 2026 Promoting Research Opportunities and Open Forums (PROOF) award to support her collaborative research project and summer team meeting at UC Berkeley.

Louis Römer, Lecturer in Anthropology, has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Fellowship to complete his book project, Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves. The ethnographic research informing this project was also funded by Wenner-Gren.

Hadley Bergstrom, Professor of Psychological Science and Director of Neuroscience and Behavior, received a new grant from the National Institutes of Health for his ongoing research project, titled “Differentiating fear generalization and extinction neuronal ensembles in prefrontal cortex.”

Under the direction of Colleen Mallet, Director of Veteran Students Outreach and Support, Vassar secured a new grant from the Watertown Committee of the David, Helen and Marian Woodward Fund to continue supporting the Woodward Fund Veterans Internships. This funding enables Vassar veterans to participate in summer internships that might not otherwise be possible due to financial constraints.

Vassar received institutional funding from Interfaith America (IA) through the Prejudice to Pluralism initiative. The co-PIs on the grant are Rev. Callista Isabelle, Associate Dean of the College for Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices; Kimberly Williams Brown, Associate Professor of Education and Director of Engaged Pluralism; and Carlos Alamo, Dean of the College and Professor of Sociology.

Seungsook Moon, Professor of Sociology, and Jihye Seong, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Studies, were awarded a 2026 Seed Program for Korean Studies grant from The Academy of Korean Studies under the Ministry of Education, South Korea, to promote the development of Korean Studies.

Trevor Hyde, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, received the American Mathematical Society’s AMS-Simons Research Enhancement Grant for Primarily Undergraduate Institute (PUI) Faculty for his research in arithmetic dynamics.

In collaboration with two colleagues from Yale University, Zhengren Zhu, Assistant Professor of Economics, received a grant from the Urban Institute’s Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI) for a research study titled Dual Enrollment Courses and Upward Mobility: Which Skills, and for Whom?