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Dr. Molldrem and Collaborators Secure Three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Community Development (RCD) Grant

Mar 17, 2023, 08:48 AM by User Not Found

With Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs) Dr. David Ribes and Dr. Marika Cifor of the University of Washington and Dr. Andrew Spieldenner of California State University-San Marcos, UTMB Bioethics and Health Humanities Assistant Professor Dr. Stephen Molldrem was recently awarded a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Community Research Development (RCD) grant titled “Knowledge of HIV/AIDS: Expertise, Participation, and the Archive in the Long Pandemic.” The grant was awarded by the Science and Technology Studies (STS) Program within the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE).

 The RCD project will bring together social scientific and humanistic scholars of HIV/AIDS situated within the interdisciplinary field of STS. The core goal of the three-year award is to support community formation, the exchange of ideas, and to foster novel cutting edge research to synthesize knowledge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among STS scholars. Activities will be organized to bridge past findings of social studies of HIV/AIDS with contemporary trajectories in the field focused around three core themes: the archive, expertise, and participation. This RCD project aims to overcome the intellectual fragmentation that has occurred in social studies of HIV/AIDS in STS and its constituent disciplines since the late 1990s by creating infrastructure to support a scholarly community around these topics. This project will assemble a productive research community via a series of three annual workshops; by developing an online forum for coordination; by supporting new research collaborations with small grants; and by creating a robust mentorship program that will pair early career scholars with more established scholars. The project will support the next generation of scholars focused on social studies of infectious disease, and will seek to develop general insight for both long-standing and emerging pandemics.