Rotman 2022 Catalyst Grant Recipients
Last fall, the Rotman Institute of Philosophy invited members to submit innovative and early-stage research projects to the 2022 Rotman Catalyst Grants Program Competition.
The program promises to award up to $50,000 with a maximum of up to $20,000 per grant for a funding period of 2 years. These grants are offered once per year and are intended to support new projects among interdisciplinary teams for which external funding would otherwise be difficult to obtain due to the early-stage nature of the proposed project.
In its first year, the institute received a number of very strong applications highlighting innovative research sectors with large interdisciplinary teams – reviewers did not have an easy decision to make! The panel was particularly impressed by the novelty of the proposals and the potential for high impact and involvement in diverse communities. Other categories in which the winning proposals ranked high include scientific and technical merit, the potential to leverage additional funding, and the overall team and management.
Without further ado, the Rotman Institute of Philosophy’s 2022 Catalyst Grant Awardees are…
Jackie Sullivan and Eric Desjardins!
Our congratulations are extended to their teams: Jackie will be working with Jacob Neal, Lindsay Bodell, Jacob Shelley, and Sarah Arnaud; Eric will be working with Kathleen Hill, David Edgell, Karas Bogumil, Massimiliano Simons, Stefan Linquist, Jacob Neal, and Derek Oswick.
Read below to learn more about their research proposals with exciting work planned over the next 2 years!
Our project seeks to understand synthetic biology’s place in society to better inform its governance. We seek to capture synthetic biology as a deeply social enterprise composed of a complex network of actors involved in ongoing coevolution processes. Instead of merely parroting the common but mistaken notion that scientists know best and public opposition is rooted in scientific ignorance, we seek to understand how shared values (epistemic and moral) unite or divide stakeholders.
By understanding how this network of actors can influence each other, we hope to better inform policy decisions and predict points of disagreement. To enable this goal, there are two major phases.
First, we want to characterize the main areas of research in synthetic biology. We will begin by using previously published SynBio categories, but ultimately, we plan to construct our own set of categories via text mining.
Second, we will use the categories we have identified to choose a particular field for more in-depth investigation.
Within this field, we will select a local case study. By focusing on this case study, we can get a better sense of the diversity of proximal (and global) stakeholders we would expect to be involved in any given case study and see how the groups’ values differ. Using the results of our case study, we want to highlight how synthetic biology and society shape one another, given the interplay between the groups with distinct values.
Claims about the “obesity epidemic” are ubiquitous in the scientific press and mass media. At the same time, eating disorders (EDs) are on the rise in most segments of the population, and weight stigma and fatphobia are well-documented by scholars and activists. Together, these factors have contributed to global health crises.
Many different groups of researchers, scholars, and activists have developed their own discourses to address the crisis surrounding weight stigma, obesity, and EDs. These groups include scholars working in critical obesity studies, fat studies, and public health policy, as well as clinicians, such as ED specialists, bariatric surgeons, and health care providers who endorse a position of Health at Every Size (HAES). Despite the urgent need for solutions, these groups tend to form relatively polarized communities and rarely interact productively with each other. This lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing among groups hinders progress in this area.
Our project aims to address this shortcoming by bringing together individuals adopting different perspectives on this health crisis. We aim to establish lines of communication between the various camps and help them develop a shared framework for thinking about the connections between weight and health.
To achieve this end, we propose to bring representatives from these camps together in a transdisciplinary conference, in which all participants are tasked with addressing a particular case study and relating their approach to others’ approaches. Facilitatinglines of communication among these groups is a necessary first step to developing more just and effective interventions on weight stigma, obesity, and EDs.
