Mary Pattillo, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University, will assess monetary sanctions as they relate to several kinds of justice. Monetary sanctions include fines, fees, restitution, surcharges, interest, and other costs imposed on people who are convicted of crimes ranging from traffic violations to violent felonies. Following the ruling in Timbs v. Indiana, she will explore constitutional justice and ask if monetary sanctions constitute excessive fines in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Please visit the seminar page to reserve time to meet with Professor Pattillo.

Dan Eisenberg, CSDE Affiliate and Associate Professor of Anthropology, studied the DNA of nearly 3000 grandparents, plus their children and grandchildren, and found that a child’s telomere length correlates with the age at which their fathers and grandfathers reproduced. Telomeres are stretches of repetitive DNA at the ends of our chromosomes. These shorten each time a cell divides, so usually get shorter over a lifetime.

Because telomere length may play a role in longevity, this could represent older fathers adapting their children’s DNA for an environment in which it may be possible to live a longer life, says Eisenberg.

CSDE Regional Affiliate David Swanson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at UC-Riverside, was recently appointed by the University of New Mexico Dean for Research to serve as a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Center for Geospatial and Population Studies. Swanson was also invited to visit the U. S. Bureau of the Census as a 2019 Summer at Census Scholar. He is invited to engage in collaborative research with Census Bureau researchers and staff and to prepare and present a Summer at Census seminar based on his research.

Applications for CSDE’s Grant Writing Summer Program are due by 6:00 PM on 5/3/2019! The program is designed to assist early-career scholars and those who are relatively new to writing NIH grant applications. Participants will be coached through the process of developing a competitive application, learn more about NIH grant mechanisms, writing, and reviewing, and engage in an intensive writing workshop with regular meetings, discussion sessions, and feedback. CSDE aims to demystify the grant-writing process and create a supportive environment that produces proposals ready for submission by the Fall.

William T. Riley, OBSSR Director, thanked all of you for submitting comments to the BSSR definition RFI/crowdsourcing effort. Your comments have informed the final revision of the BSSR definition, which is now available on OBSSR’s website. Some suggestions, although not reflected in the BSSR definition, will be used to for future blog post topics to share in-depth discussion of the areas of science that are included in the BSSR at NIH.