Three Trinity faculty are among the recipients of the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Awards. Tony Cheng, assistant professor of Sociology, Jean Philippe Gibert, assistant professor of Biology, and Masayuki Onishi, also an assistant professor of Biology, are this year’s awardees.
The NSF Early Career Awards, also known as CAREER, are among the most prestigious awards available to early-career faculty in the United States. Applications are open to all fields funded by NSF, but are reserved for faculty who have not yet obtained tenure and who demonstrate the potential to serve as leaders and academic role models. These project-based awards consist of five years of research funding, during which the recipients are expected to lay a solid foundation for their future research and education activities. As such, faculty are encouraged to submit ambitious proposals, whose results may underlie their research for years to come.
Tony Cheng
Cheng, who joined Duke last fall, is interested in power, access and inequality. His research focuses on understanding the role played by public agencies and their civil servants on the creation and shaping of inequalities within their communities. His most recent book, “The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, & the Illusion of Public Input,” addressed the community-based mechanisms through which police departments legitimate their actions, maintain independence and ultimately resist change, despite the growing public awareness of police brutality and increasing demands for police reform.
With this Early Career Award, Cheng expands his theoretical scope to all street-level bureaucracies — public entities whose servants interact directly with the public, such as schools, hospitals, post offices and, yes, police. He will focus again on the mechanisms through which these entities are able to escape through filters of accountability, arguing that by establishing “pseudo-state entities” such as foundations, unions or associations, these agencies circumvent the regulatory constraints imposed on them as public sector agencies.
Cheng’s project includes the development of a theory on how state organizations and employees establish private organizations to engage in otherwise regulated activities. By pouring over public records and datasets, as well as conducting a series of interviews with public servants, his project will also generate new empirical data on the role played by non-profits and political action committees on the agencies’ ability to avoid certain rules.
“This project was motivated by the observation that changes in laws and policies aiming to increase the accountability of state actors, like the police, often seem to represent to them new obstacles to overcome, rather than realities to accept,” Cheng said. “I am excited to learn more about the role of pseudo-state entities as a vehicle that blurs the line between the public and private to overcome regulatory challenges.”
Cheng plans to use his Early Career Award to facilitate the dissemination of resources and research through a network of academics and non-academics with a shared interest in public institutions. He also hopes to create opportunities for diverse communities to learn from one another, facilitating their interactions through new courses, an Online Summer Academy open to Duke and non-Duke graduate students, and a Shared Spotlight Series hosting discussions between scholars and organizers.
“The NSF Career Award is an impressive achievement that recognizes Tony’s unique and timely contributions to our understanding of policing — both at the macro, organizational level and micro, individual level,” said Jen’nan Read, professor and chair of Sociology. “Tony has been on a rapid upward trajectory since receiving the ‘21st Century Dissertation Prize’ at Yale University in 2021, and our department is thrilled to have him continue that journey at Duke.”
Jean Philippe Gibert
Gibert’s research focuses on tiny organisms called protists. Bundled together, these unicellular microscopic organisms have a greater biomass than all animals on the planet combined, humans and cattle included, and may play a role on the planet’s future climate — or at least on our understanding of the impacts of climate change. That’s because protists can act as both a source and a sink of CO2, depending on their environment and on how much food they have around them in the shape of bacteria.
The complex relationship between microbes mirrors the dynamics we see in any other ecosystem — predators chasing prey, competitors fighting for food, and evolution selecting for those who do better under different circumstances — with one big advantage: they can be grown in a petri dish under a wide range of conditions, in a short amount of time.
With his NSF Early Career Award, Gibert will focus on one species of protist, Tetrahymena thermophila, and its long-term response to warming temperatures. There are several strains of Tetrahymena that differ slightly in their genetic makeup. Combining experiments and mathematical modelling, Gibert aims at understanding how much of the variation observed in Tetrahymena’s populations’ ability to grow is due purely to their genetic makeup; how much is due to their environment — temperature, but also the presence of competitors, prey and predators; and how much is due to the specific way their genes interact with their environment. Interactions between genes and the environment are what drives ecological adaptation, so Gibert hopes these results will help us predict how species adapt to a changing climate and, through their role in food webs, how will they impact the other species around them.
“Understanding how organismal temperature-responses themselves might evolve under warming is both a fundamental, long-standing question in ecology, and one of the most pressing issues of our generation,” he said. “We’re very excited about this grant because it allows us to address that question directly.”
Gibert, who is French-Uruguayan, plans to use his Early Career Award to address anti-science and anti-immigration sentiments through a series of mini-documentaries showcasing the impact of immigrant researchers on American science and society.
“Jean-Philippe has been an outspoken advocate for Hispanic and international students and scholars, particularly in an era of fluctuating immigration policies,” said Emily Bernhardt, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and chair of Biology. “His proposed research and educational plans will establish his lab as a hub for integrative ecological research on climate change.”
Masayuki Onishi
Onishi’s research focuses on a process almost as old as time: cellular division. Cellular division is indispensable to life, underlying growth, regeneration, reproduction and more. All living things divide cells. This means that all the way back to the origins of life, the very first cells on Earth divided themselves.
The exact mechanisms through which cells divide vary across the tree of life, but very little is known about them. According to most textbooks, eukaryotic cells — those containing a nucleus, such as cells from protists, plants, animals and fungi — should divide like a balloon being cinched in half by a ring-shaped string, forming a furrow. In reality, many eukaryotic cells do not have or use such a ring to form a furrow, and we don’t understand how they achieve it. One way of addressing this is to go back to the very beginning: How did that ancestral cell divide itself? How did we end up with such variation? And does this variation follow any identifiable theme?
With his Early Career Award, Onishi takes a close look at cellular division in the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. These algae are an evolutionary puzzle: They are related to plants, but divide by furrowing like animal cells, even though they don’t have a “ring.” They also possess a single chloroplast, the organelle responsible for photosynthesis. Using cellular and molecular biology tools, Onishi plans to identify how Chlamydomonas divide themselves and shed light on the evolutionary path that led to today’s range of cellular division mechanisms. He will also investigate how cell division is coordinated with the division and segregation of their single chloroplast. These results will help us understand how this machine within the cell, essential for fixing CO2 from the environment, works in various algae and plants.
“This project was conceived when I realized that there was a gap in our understanding of the evolution of cell division, and that Chlamydomonas was conveniently positioned on the Tree of Life to provide this missing link,” Onishi said. “I’m excited about the discoveries we’ll make with support from this NSF CAREER.”
Through his work on a poorly understood study species, Onishi will address head-on the pitfalls of relying on just a handful of model study systems. He is developing a course comparing established and emerging study systems, using guest lectures by researchers working on non-traditional study organisms. Onishi also aims to extend the impact of his research to local high schools, hosting students and funding high school teachers to join his lab every summer.
“Masa joined Duke Biology in the spring of 2020, just two months before the COVID pandemic began,” Bernhardt said. “In spite of the difficulty of starting in such a challenging time, he established his lab, recruited a great team, published exciting new research, initiated new collaborations and demonstrated his talent as both a classroom teacher and a research mentor. He is on a very strong research trajectory, which will be propelled even further with this CAREER Award.”
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
