“In Conversation with Contemporary Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: What it Means to Practice” is a study of the relationship between objects and practice in Pure Land Buddhism as told by the practitioners themselves. Interviewing scholars and practitioners of contemporary Chinese Pure Land Buddhism and visiting key sites of practice in the Shanghai area, I will […]

The project investigates the practices of contemporary Buddhist Monastics in relation to their interaction and communication with family members. The question to be investigated is: To what extent, if at all, do contemporary monastics maintain relationships with living family members? The research will focus, in particular, on ways that family is understood in this context […]

My project will be examining different aspects of Chinese popular religion, including online representations, physical landmarks, and firsthand accounts, and drawing connections between popular religion in China and the self- and community-identities of lay practitioners in Beijing. I will be visiting sites in Beijing, including St. Joseph’s Cathedral, Yonghe Gong, and Baiyun Guan, examining primary […]

Baroque is defined as an irregular pearl, and it is described as an oddity. This oddity or kink, as defined in the dictionary, hints at how the baroque that Spain created transcended an artistic style. In Spain during the XVI century, including the conquest in 1521 in Mexico all the way to the beginning of […]

In most commonly studied languages, the subjects of all sentences are marked the same way. In some less commonly studied languages including Nepali, however, subjects of transitive verbs are treated as subjects, while subjects of intransitive verbs are marked the same way as objects of transitive verbs. These are called “ergative” languages. If we imagine […]

The focus of this project is to explore how livelihoods are affected when changes in ecosystem services within the Miyun watershed occur. Rural households depend on ecosystem services that the landscape provides for their livelihoods. If the availability of these resources were to change, a person’s livelihood may become more vulnerable. Determining possible ecosystem service […]

My research project examines the regulation of China’s Internet telecommunication sectors in the post-WTO era. It situates the current state of regulation (media ownership, competition,foreign-direct-investment, and content controls) against the historical development of Chinese telecommunication and internet industries. Using two case studies to illustrate contradictions and problems in regulating national internet and telecommunication service in an […]

Child morbidity and mortality rates are directly influenced by pathogens that are present in our every day lives. In India, densely populated areas have seen increases in affected children over recent years. In order to combat the increasing rate of antimicrobial resistant pathogens such as E. coli, an easy to use, practical and cost effective […]

Augmented Reality (AR) is the combination of virtual images with real objects in order to improve perception. It is a rapidly growing field and has many applications in medicine. For this research project we would like to apply AR to the surgical site during a simulated operation in order to provide additional information and improve […]

In mechanically ventilated critically ill patients, sleep disruption may contribute to prolonged weaning leading to longer intensive care unit stay and hospital mortality. It was reported that sleep disruption affects the outcome of noninvasive ventilation and we hypothesize that it may also have an impact in mechanically ventilated patients on the weaning outcome. We propose […]

Virtual worlds, like Second Life, have been adopted by researchers to assess students’ understandings of the knowledge they have learned. Students’ performances of solving the challenges and quests in the virtual worlds can be treated as their overall mastery of the taught concepts and skills. However, the answers of the questions like “do they have […]

The proposed research project is on asphalt rehabilitation materials called cold in-place recycling (CIR) and full depth reclamation (FDR). Those pavement rehabilitation techniques are gaining popularity because of their lower cost and their lower environmental footprint than conventional pavement reconstruction. In both case, asphalt pavement, and a part of the granular base for FDR, are […]