Grants Awarded
Please see below for awards received during the current and prior fiscal year. Click on In This Section/Past Grants Awarded for awards going back to FY 2013.
Grants Awarded in FY 2026
FACULTY GRANTS
Philipp Gemmel, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, received an American Chemical Society 2025 ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable Grant for Increasing the Breadth and Utility of Enzymes in Pharma Manufacturing. Philipp’s green chemistry project, Enzyme-mediated protecting group chemistry: Site-selective deprotection of benzyl ethers, is a collaborative research project, with monthly input from selected Roundtable member representatives, and will explore a critical step in organic synthesis. For more information, see here.
Megan Crutcher, Ann Plato Postdoctoral Fellow in History, received a grant from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology for her project, Where Trees Meet the Tide: Documenting Traditional Watercraft Construction in Liberia, West Africa, which documents the design, construction, and cultural significance of traditional dugout canoes and larger, motorized “Fanti boats” in Liberia, West Africa. The grant will allow Megan to travel to conduct her research.
Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, received a subaward through The Renewal Project, a Mellon Foundation grant to the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. Davarian will provide intellectual and strategic oversight to the Renewal Project helping to guide conceptualization and implementation of the archival, pedagogical, and public humanities pillars for the project. The award will support Davarian’s time during the summers of 2025 and 2026.
INSTITUTIONAL GRANTS
Liliana Polley, Executive Director of the Center for Hartford Engagement and Research, received a grant from the State of Connecticut Health and Educational Facilities Authority (CHEFA) through its FY 2026 CHEFA John M. Biancamano Client Grant Program for parking lot repaving and accessibility renovations at Trinfo. For more on Trinfo’s 25th anniversary and reopening, see here.
Grants Awarded in FY 2025
FACULTY GRANTS
Arts
Robert Kirschbaum, Professor of Fine Arts, received a fellowship grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (MFJC) for his Ashlar Series: creating intaglio and relief prints. The MFJC promotes the global regeneration of Jewish culture by supporting, developing, and connecting scholars, artists, filmmakers, rabbis, and Jewish communal lay leaders and professionals around the world. Read more.
Humanities
Diana Aldrete, Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights, received an American Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to complete her manuscript, Between Land and Death: Women Writing for Justice in Mexico. The fellowship will allow Diana to dedicate the full 2025-26 academic year to her project, extending her early career research leave. Read more.
Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, received a two-year $300,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for his Smart Cities Research Lab. This award will support the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) and Wealth Redistribution Analysis Project as well as collaboration with the University of Minnesota on The Renewal Project. Support will allow Davarian to conduct trainings, workshops, and convenings in local communities nationally and internationally. The grant will also support undergraduate fellowships. Read more. He also received support from the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his Smart Cities Research Lab.
The Trinity Social Justice Institute, led by co-directors Jordan Camp, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Christina Heatherton, Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights, was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Antipode Foundation. The grant will support their TSJI podcast, Conjuncture.
Physical/Natural Sciences
Jonathan Ashby, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, was awarded a Pittcon Undergraduate Analytical Research Program Grant (UARP) from the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh to support two students working on his research project: Development of covalently binding fluorogenic dyes as labels for mass spectrometric analysis of proteinnucleic acid complexes. Read more.
Tim Curran, Vernon K. Krieble Professor of Chemistry, was awarded a PUI Summer Research Grant from Organic Syntheses to fund two years of an undergraduate summer research project focusing on recent discoveries made in his lab related to peptide dendrimers. Read more.
Michael Grubb, Associate Professor of Psychology, received a travel award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Perception, Action & Cognition (PAC) Program to support 26 undergraduate student members of the Vision Sciences Society to attend the Society’s annual meeting.
Michelle Kovarik, Dr. Henry A. DePhillips, Jr. Professor of Chemistry, received an American Chemical Society (ACS) Project SEED grant to provide two high school students from low-income households with stipends to participate in chemistry research projects at Trinity for 8 weeks during the summer. Michelle and Cheyenne Brindle, Associate Professor of Chemistry each supervised one student during the program. This award was also supported by the Connecticut Valley Section of the ACS.
Kirsti Kuenzel, Associate Professor of Mathematics received an American Mathematical Society Simons Research Enhancement Grant for Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI) Faculty. The grant will support travel for Kirsti and her collaborators for their research in graph theory. Read more.
Michael Puljung, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Chemistry, received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R15 AREA grant for his research, KATP: Dynamics of a Channel-Enzyme Complex. The three-year grant will allow Mike to study membrane bound proteins that allow charged ions to pass into cells. In the pancreatic cells Mike studies, these membrane proteins play a role in controlling insulin secretion, so improper function can be directly linked to disease. Read more.
Sally Bernardina Seraphin, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, was selected as the 2025 Karush Scholar at the Marine Biological Labs Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to support her research project: Progress in Developmental Neuroscience: From E.E. Just, to the Present, & Beyond.
Social Sciences
Hasan Comert, Maloney Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Economics, was awarded a fellowship at the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass-Amherst (PERI) to pursue his research project: Exchange Rate Shocks, Economic Inequality, and Gender Disparities in Turkey: A History and Context Sensitive Analysis with Lessons for Comparative Studies. Read more.
Lucius Couloute, Assistant Professor of Sociology, was awarded an Emerging Poverty Scholars Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty. This two-year award will provide support for Lucius’s research on guaranteed income among those with felony records, the experiences of Black women with criminalized partners, and labor market exclusion and exploitation among formerly incarcerated people.
Laura Humm Delgado, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, received an American Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for her research, Unsettled: Gentrification’s influence on one social service organization’s ability to serve older adults of color over fifty years. The fellowship will allow Laura to dedicate the full 2025-26 academic year to her research, extending her early career research leave. Read more.
Dang Do, Assistant Professor of Political Science, was awarded a grant from the Institute for Humane Studies to support his research project: Voices of Color: The State-Level Dynamics of Racial Minority Interest Group Lobbying. This fellowship will allow Dang to extend his early career research leave so he can dedicate the full 2025-26 year to his book project. Dang was also awarded a Resident Engagement grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving to support his Voter Captain Project. This project seeks to increase civic participation in Hartford through the recruitment and training of resident civic leaders and builds off his first Hartford Foundation grant in 2024.
Gabriel Salgado, Assistant Professor of Political Science, was awarded a residential fellowship for the Spring 2026 semester from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. This fellowship will extend Gabe’s early career research leave so he can dedicate the full 2025-26 academic year to work on his book project, Unsettling Race: Blood Purity and Colonial Worldmaking in the Early Modern Spanish Empire.
STUDENT GRANT RECIPIENTS
Trinity College students Alexander Cacciato ’26 and Benedicte Baile ’25 were each awarded a Projects for Peace grant for the summer of 2025.
Benedicte’s project, Un Nouveau Départ (A New Beginning), will take place in her home country of Burkina Faso. Working with a local organization, Benedicte’s project will support refugee families through a community-driven agricultural initiative focused on training, resource distribution, and market access.
Alex’s project, Next General Talk (NGT) will take place in Senegal. The project, to be completed in conjunction with Guédiawaye Hip Hop, a local education organization, will bring proven hip hop-based education to four suburban areas around Dakar to encourage civic engagement among youth who often don’t have equitable access to democratic participation.
STUDENT FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS
Sophia Jones ’24 was awarded a Fulbright for an English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) in Argentina. She is interested in language learning and hopes to one day develop policy and curricula for language educators. More here.
Rose Molloy ’26 was awarded a Beinecke Scholarship, which will support her continuing study of political science in graduate school. More here.
Aili Ramsden ’25 was awarded a Fulbright/Maastricht University Award. She will go to Maastricht University on her Fulbright to study developmental psychology. More here.
INSTITUTIONAL GRANTS
Trinity has been awarded a three-year $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation Higher Learning program for a humanities-centered project, Urban Environmental Justice in Greater Hartford, that focuses on community engagement, student and faculty research, and curricular development. In partnership with the Stowe Center for Literary Activism and the Center for Justice and Leadership/Greater Hartford Interfaith Action Alliance, the project aims to encourage informed public dialogue on how historical land use decisions have imposed health and environmental consequences on Hartford’s predominantly Latine and Black residents and to build regional consensus to address challenges brought about by that history. The grant team will be led by Garth Myers, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies, Abigail Fisher Williamson, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy & Law, and Amanda Guzmán, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Read more.
For its commitment to youth-driven service and youth development, Trinity College has received a $10,000 College Service Grant from The Allstate Foundation in collaboration with the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO). This grant will enable Trinity to support its Writing Center’s community efforts in Trinity’s Prison Education Project (TPEP) at the Hartford Correctional Center (HCC) and working with local high school students through Trinfo, a neighborhood community space. James Truman, Director of Peer Tutoring in Writing and Senior Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric, is the faculty lead for this grant. Read more.
The S & L Marx Foundation awarded Trinity a three-year grant focused on Hartford engaged programming that will support the following programs: Trin-HMTCA Tutoring Program led by CHER Executive Director Liliana Polley; VITA Tax Clinic led by Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Law Serena Laws; Liberal Arts Action Lab led by LAAL Director and Lecturer in Public Policy & Law Derin Atalay; and Trinity’s Prison Education Program led by Assistant Professor of Political Science Anna Terwiel, Visiting Lecturer in Human Rights Joseph Lea, and Director of Peer Tutoring in Writing and Senior Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric James Truman.
The Henry Luce Foundation provided grants at the request of President Joanne Berger-Sweeney that will support Trinity’s 2025 Samba Fest, produced by Eric Galm, Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology, and Trinity’s 2025 International Hip Hop Festival, organized by students with faculty advisor Seth Markle, Associate Professor of History and International Studies. Read more about the 2025 Samba Fest here and the 2025 Hip Hop Festival here.
Christina Bleyer, College Librarian and Associate Vice President of Libraries and Digital Learning, Director of Special Collections and Archives, Watkinson Library secured a grant from the Connecticut State Dental Foundation for Trinity’s Watkinson Library to digitize the Hartford Medical Society holdings related to Horace Wells and other valuable resources that chronicle the evolution of dental practices, education, and public health in Connecticut.
The Rathmann Family Foundation provided grants support to three programs: the Trinity’s Student Emergency and Equity Fund (SEEF); the Trinity Softball program, and the Trinity Baseball program.
The Lower Connecticut Valley (LCV) Branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) awarded a grant to Trinity’s Prison Education Project (TPEP) to support a course at York Correctional Institute during the summer of 2025. Assistant Professor of Political Science Anna Terweil, Visiting Lecturer in Human Rights Joseph Lea, and Director of Peer Tutoring in Writing and Senior Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric James Truman are co-directors of TPEP.
Trinity College received a grant from the Tanaka Memorial Foundation to support international engagement and research. Specifically, the grant will support Trinity’s participation in the 2026 Technos International Week in Japan.
Dream Camp received recent grants for general support from the Barnes Foundation, Elizabeth M. Landon and Harriette M. Landon Charitable Foundation, the Ensworth Charitable Foundation, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Stanley D. and Hinda N. Fisher Fund, and the Charles Nelson Robinson Fund.
Scholarships/Financial Aid Grants
Trinity also received generous grants from the following organizations in support of student scholarships and financial aid:
- Davis United World College Scholars Program
- Scholarships for Illinois Residents, Inc.
- Taylor Educational Foundation
- Council of Independent Colleges (Dorothea M. Waterbury Scholarship)
- New York Community Trust (A. Evelyn Cronquist Fund)
