The University of Arkansas at Little Rock College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences awarded $10,480 in Summer Research Fellowship Grants to four professors who are spending their summer breaks performing unique research. 

The grant winners include Michael Warrick, professor of sculpture from the Department of Art and Design; Shanzhi Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry; Heather Hummel, assistant professor in the Department of English; and Zachary Hagins, professor in the Department of World Languages.

Warrick received $2,480 to enlarge his traditional clay portraits of contemporary architects of peace in his project, “Portraits of Peace.”

Utilizing contemporary 3D scanning and scaling technology, he plans to produce monumentally scaled portraits reflecting the benefits of meditation and spiritual centeredness. Additional long-term prospects for the project include a touring exhibition and a lecture series titled “Portraits of Peace in Clay and Bronze.”

In his project, “Enzymatic studies of BbI06 from Lyme disease causing Borrelia burgdorferi,” Wang has received $4,000 to fund an early step of a larger research project that has a long-term goal to eliminate Borrelia burgdorferi, bacteria that causes Lyme Disease, by inhibiting all three isoforms of methylthioadenosine nucleosidases of Borrelia burgdorferi (pfs, bgp and BbI06).

Hummel has received $1,650 for a research trip that follows the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. She will visit historic sites and museums on her week-long, 1,300-mile loop through Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. The information gathered along the way will be used to write a collection of poems that reconsiders the historic civil rights narratives against the urgency of social justice issues today.

The final grant recipient, Hagins, received $2,350 to travel to Arles and Paris, France, to gather primary sources to finish drafting two chapters of his book manuscript.

“Visualizing Diversity in the Republic: Contemporary Photography and the French Urban Periphery” explores how engaged photography can show how underprivileged social actors in France negotiate political, social, and cultural obstacles in their everyday lives. After completing the research, Hagins will be able to submit the manuscript for publication.

In the upper right photo, Michael Warrick stands by his sculpture, “Straight Lines on a Round World,” in front of the Statehouse Convention Center in downtown Little Rock, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase Survey.