Ricki Klages
Global Engagement Office
Cheney International Center
1000 E University Ave
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: 1-307-766-3677
Email: global@uwyo.edu
Published January 10, 2025
By Gregory Ronco
Twelve members of the UW faculty and staff were awarded funding during the CGS International Research Funding fall 2024 cycle. Funding is provided through a partnership with the Center for Global Studies and Research and Economic Development Division.
“Painting the Neolithic: Standing Stones and Stone Circles”
Painting the Neolithic: Standing Stones and Stone Circles’, represents an ongoing investigation resulting in a series of paintings depicting and influenced by ancient stone circles and standing stones as well as other Neolithic sites in the British Isles. With this award, I plan to travel even further into the Neolithic landscape of Ireland to document out-of-the-way and lesser-known sites primarily in the south and central region, the west coast, the Isle of Skellig, and Newgrange, just outside of Dublin for a larger series of oil paintings, painted shrines and large, horizontal paintings encompassing the vastness of stone circles in their entirety. This body of work will be presented as a series in a variety of exhibitions in the coming year.
“Echoes of Empire: Germany’s Colonial Afterlife in the Weimar Republic”
My book project, entitled Echoes of Empire: Germany’s Colonial Afterlife in the Weimar Republic, explores how former German colonists assuaged their humiliated egos against a backdrop of military defeat, political revolution, and economic catastrophe between 1919 and 1933. Significantly, this study illustrates how civic engagement with pro-colonial literary works, monuments, and mass spectacles fashioned a revanchist national discourse that persuaded white German women and men to distinguish Germany as a model imperial agent. Though the fantasies that they contrived were purely feverish attempts to cast colonial rule in a positive, irredentist light, former colonists raised awareness about their supposed plight and shaped the contours of German colonial memory, a fact that continues to have dire consequences in the present-day world.
“Geoscience Digital Twins for Enhanced Alternative Energy Development”
Digital Twins (DTs) are predictive, large-scale AI models that strive to perfectly simulate real-world physical systems from start to finish but are also adaptive due to integration and synchronization of real-time inputs. Dr. B. Carr, Sr. Research Scientist in the UW Dept. of Geology and Geophysics, is leading an initiative to develop Geoscience Digital Twins (DT-Geo) at UW for geologic hazards as well as enhanced alternative and energy development. This effort intends to build DTs for geologic hazards (earthquakes, landslides, hydrothermal/volcanic monitoring, etc.), but add-in features relevant to groundwater and energy (hydrothermal/geothermal/Uranium/critical minerals) whose interactions benefit the State of Wyoming. Currently, the European DT-GEO project (GEO3BCN-CSIC Barcelona, Spain) is the first large-scale platform for developing a prototype DT for geophysical extremes. During the Spring 2025 semester, Dr. Carr will be traveling to CSIC – Barcelona to study the European geoscience digital twin (DT-GEO) effort and start working on developing similar DTs at UW. UW is uniquely positioned for this groundbreaking work due to current access to high power computing (HPC) facilities as well as recently funded efforts for a DT hardware facility. Travel to Barcelona in spring 2025 is funded by a collaborative research travel grant from the UW Center for Global Studies and the UW Research and Economic Development Division.
“Documenting Street Art in Response to Hamas’s Attack on October 7, 2023”
The project, Documenting Street Art in Response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas Attack, builds on my Fulbright Scholars Award in Israel (2023-24), during which I explored Street art as a visual artifact of cultural conflict in Israel and Palestine. This research now shifts focus to examine how Street art has evolved following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, which has profoundly impacted the region’s political, social, and cultural dynamics.
The study aims to capture newly created artworks, shifts in narrative themes, and changes in the use of public spaces. Documentation and interviews with Street artists will be developed into a full-length book project that will analyze the visual complexity of Street art and its role in expressing trauma, identity, and resistance. This project is significant as it enables a deeper scholarly understanding of the intersection between Street art, politics, and social justice movements in critical conflict zones during war.
"Empowering Early Stress Detection with AI: A Global Plant Phenotyping Initiative"
This project aims to advance agricultural practices by utilizing high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) to enhance early detection of plant water stress through innovative computational techniques. As climate pressures impact agriculture, the study of plant phenotypes—visible traits resulting from genetic and environmental interactions—becomes crucial for improving crop performance. Collaborating with leading institutions in Italy, we will integrate artificial intelligence and deep learning methods to analyze RGB and thermal images of cotton plants, focusing on anomaly detection to identify water limitations. This initiative not only aligns with UW’s mission to foster sustainable agriculture but also aims to enhance international collaboration, bolster student recruitment, and position UW as a global leader in controlled environment agriculture innovation.
“Developing Ecosonic Interaction Networks to study whole community interactions in a tropical rainforest”
This project introduces a new approach called Ecosonic Interaction Networks (EINs), which tracks how species interact acoustically. By collecting 1260 days of acoustic data from 60 sites in the rainforests of central Panama, my team will use machine learning to identify different sounds in the environment. Microphone arrays will pinpoint the exact 3-dimensional location of single-course sounds (from birds, monkeys, amphibians, poachers), giving a clearer picture of what is happening in this complex ecosystem. The main goals of the project are threefold: (1) to quantify soundscape dynamics to better how acoustic interactions change over time, (2) localizing sounds to determine where specific sounds come from, and (3) quantifying Ecosonic Interaction Networks by combining the data from the first two goals to explore how biotic and abiotic factors influence interactions. Ultimately, the research aims to create new tools for studying and monitoring biodiversity, helping with conservation and habitat restoration efforts in tropical forests. The results will also support the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze ecological data, advancing research in both biodiversity and animal behavior.
“South Asian Women and Transnational Abandonment in UK: Role of South Asian Community and Community-based Organizations”
Using a socioecological framework Dr. Neely Mahapatra will utilize a convergent mixed-method design where quantitative and qualitative data will be collected concurrently and then analyzed separately to create new knowledge that will inform developing a safety net and best practices for South Asian immigrant women in UK who have experienced transnational abandonment which is a form of intimate partner violence. Dr. Mahapatra, during Spring 2025 will collect information (1) about experiences of women of South Asian origin who are victims/survivors of transnational abandonment through in-depth qualitative interviews; (2) about the role of UK-based community organizations (e.g., Southall Black Sisters) in supporting victims/survivors of transnational abandonment in delineating current practice and policy implications through an online and paper survey and individual interviews/focus groups; and, (3) about the role of the South Asian community in supporting victims/survivors of transnational abandonment through individual interviews/focus groups of South Asian community members (including community leaders, religious leaders, and South Asian youth).
“Enhancing Reading Comprehension and Writing Skills Through Structured Literacy for Language with Japanese School-Age Students”
Dr. Douglas Petersen, along with a team of graduate and undergraduate students from the Division of Communication Disorders and the Literacy Education doctoral program at the University of Wyoming, will travel to Okinawa, Japan, to evaluate the impact of a systematic and explicit language curriculum on reading comprehension and writing. This project builds upon a long-standing research-to-practice partnership with a school serving children with special needs in Japan. All students, ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade, will be randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. Students in the treatment group will receive explicit and systematic oral language instruction delivered by classroom teachers. This initiative represents the first large-scale implementation of a multi-tiered, explicit, and systematic language curriculum across primary and secondary grade levels in Japan.
“Positive Migrant Memories through Narratives in Transit”
In the twenty-first century, migrants generally travel with small backpacks carrying a few belongings and memories from their culture and life experiences. This project contemplates organizing “positive narratives” workshops with people from Central America temporarily staying at the “Hospitalidad y Solidaridad” shelter in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico. These positive narratives will consist of remembrances of food, religious festivities, places, daily practices, and music from their place of origin. Our goal is to reunite memories to create social and cultural ties from the past, present, and future, an idea proposed by Elizabeth Jelin (2002). At the end of this project, we will create a blog to disseminate the participants' narratives. The results of these narratives will also be published in an article in a peer-reviewed journal.
“Assessing Student Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A faculty learning community partnership between University of The Free State, South Africa and The University of Wyoming, USA”
Dr. Janel Seeley will conduct a research project entitled, “Assessing Student Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A faculty learning community partnership between University of The Free State, South Africa and The University of Wyoming, USA.” This project will bring together scholars working on scholarship of teaching and learning projects in Bloemfontein, South Africa and Laramie, Wyoming, setting up a cross-cultural exchange of scholarship and research through this international community of practice.
“A comparative molecular approach to understanding depression and suicide in U.S. and Indian populations”
Depression and suicide are significant global health challenges, with depression being a major risk factor for suicidal behavior. This project investigates these conditions at the molecular level using postmortem transcriptomics data from individuals in both U.S. and Indian populations. In collaboration with Dr. Datusalia from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research in India, this research aims to identify shared and unique biological pathways, uncover biomarkers, and explore the role of genetic and environmental factors in these illnesses. By integrating molecular data from diverse populations, the study seeks to advance our understanding of depression and suicide, paving the way for improved therapeutic strategies and international research partnerships.
“Exploring an international partnership in physical education teacher training and mentoring: The infusion of student-centered instructional models”
Utilizing teaching and instructional models that support student motivation are best to support student learning and behavior. A substantial body of research shows that a student-centered instructional model known as Sport Education (SEM) increases students’ motivation and learning in physical education (e.g. Wallhead et al., 2013). Despite this evidence, K-12 PE teachers specifically within Asian school cultures may have difficulties implementing the model in practice. The purpose of this research is to explore the impact of building an international peer mentorship program for enhancing the implementation of SEM and its influence on K-12 students’ physical literacy. A four-week course on SEM will be delivered in Shanghai and data collected to assess (1) the level of understanding and competence of Chinese pre-service teachers who are peer-mentored by their American counterparts with the SEM (2) explore the level of acceptance and modification of the SEM within the context and (3) the impact of the SEM on the Chinese K-12 students’ physical literacy.
Global Engagement Office
Cheney International Center
1000 E University Ave
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: 1-307-766-3677
Email: global@uwyo.edu