Researching, Beyond

While Trinity University offers well-funded institutional research opportunities, our acclaimed faculty don’t rest on their laurels.

With the consistency and competitiveness you’d expect to see from a larger research institution, Trinity faculty regularly bring in major sources of funding to give Tigers of all backgrounds the chance to conduct meaningful research in STEM fields, the social sciences, and the humanities.

These are just some of the faculty and recent funding driving our sense of discovery.

Amy Stone

Sociology and Anthropology
National Science Foundation
Stone is studying the housing stability of LGBTQ+ youths, in particular the effect of non-parental family members on supporting LGBTQ+ youth who’ve been kicked out of their homes. “Something important about San Antonio is understanding the incredibly high rates of homelessness that the LGBTQ+ community has here,” Stone says. “Trinity students just get naturally excited at the thought that they’re doing something that ends up really mattering in people’s lives.”

Jacob Tingle '95, Angela Breidenstein '91, M'92, and Katsuo Nishikawa

Business Administration, Education, and Political Science
U.S. Department of State via Project Harmony International
This trio is leading Tigers into the world of sports diplomacy after receiving a girls’ volleyball coach delegation from North Macedonia, with a Trinity delegation set to travel to the southeastern European country in the spring. “Given the power of sport to bring communities together, to collapse barriers, or to reframe personal philosophies, these diplomatic exchanges can help internationalize Trinity’s campus in important ways,” Tingle says.

Laura Hunsicker-Wang

Chemistry
San Antonio Area Foundation
Hunsicker-Wang and her students are researching the Rieske protein and its role in superoxide production. As of this summer, her lab has successfully made a new mutant and are working on quantifying the amount of superoxide it’s produced. The SAAF grant assists the lab through undergraduate research stipends and equipment purchase.

Judith Norman

Philosophy
Summerlee Foundation
Through the Philosophy and Literature Circle, Norman brings Trinity faculty and students into a discussion about the humanities with incarcerated individuals in South Texas. The group completes readings and reflective writings and engages in dialogue to develop critical think- ing and logical and ethical reasoning. “The questions of the meaning of life belong to everybody. They don’t belong to an ivory tower,” Norman says. “Knowledge is best served by extending our community and involving those with different perspectives.”

Rebecca Rapf

Chemistry
Kavli Foundation
In a project developed at the Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe meeting, Rapf and collaborators will examine the abiotic sulfur cycle on terrestrial planets, focusing on how the processing of sulfur can inform whether other worlds may be habitable. Trinity students in Rapf ’s lab will conduct kinetic experiments on sulfur chemistry anoxic environments that will inform global atmospheric models of the early Earth, early Mars, and exoplanets.

Kathryn Vomero Santos

English
Mellon Foundation
Santos is part of a team working to create an anthology of Shakespeare plays that have been reimagined by playwrights from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. These works merge Shakespeare’s plays with the cultures, languages, and histories of this region and use them to envision socially just futures in La Frontera. “We believe in the world-making power of Borderlands art to lay the foundation for more socially just futures in our scholarly fields and in our society,” Santos says.

Dania Abreu-Torres

Modern Languages and Literatures
Summerlee Foundation
Through the Summerlee grant, Abreu-Torres is part of a collaborative of faculty and staff that will support Trinity’s Digital Humanities project, “Untold Texas Histories of Trinity University, Latimore Public Humanities Initiative,” which will train and support students as they compile first-person histories. This project
is a coordination across three centers: East Asian Studies at Trinity, the Trinity Roots Commission, and Trinity’s Mexico, the Americas, and Spain program.

Mark Lewis ’96

Computer Science
National Science Foundation
Lewis’ lab is performing numerical simulations that mimic the way planetary rings react when they are disturbed by celestial objects. “These simulations involve millions of particles and can keep a cluster of machines with over 100 cores busy for months at a time,” Lewis says.

Orrin Shindell, Hoa Nguyen, and Frank Healy

Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics, and Biology
National Science Foundation
Shindell, Nguyen, and Healy are leading an interdisciplinary team of Trinity students to study how bacteria move through their fluid environment using flagella, which consist of a helical appendage rotated by a molecular motor. This NSF-supported project studies the connection between energy efficiency and the structure of the bacterial molecular motor. Their research employs methods from microbiology, biological physics, and computational fluid dynamics to create precisely calibrated computational tools that can extract the energy efficiency of molecular motor variants from experimental measurements of the medically important organism Pseudomonas aeruginosa.