This past year’s recipients of Columbia’s Professional Schools Diversity Research Fellowships have pursued a wide range of challenging topics. They range from Alzheimer’s disease to human physiological responses to threat to wind turbine power systems.

The fellowships, established in 2006, provide faculty members in the professional schools with funding for research and scholarship during the early stages of their careers. This year’s awards went to 20 junior faculty members from eight different professional schools, who received up to $25,000 in funding each to investigate topics in their fields.

The fellowships reflect the University’s goal of supporting the development of a diverse faculty. They are primarily intended for professors in disciplines in which women and minorities are underrepresented.

“The faculty are central to Columbia’s intellectual life,” said Geraldine Downey, vice provost for diversity initiatives. “[We will] continue to focus on fostering an inclusive community of scholars in all areas of the University, but we also intend to examine ways to support junior and mid-career faculty development and academic leadership.”

The research grants give these early-career academics the chance to pursue sometimes unconventional research. Stacey Sutton’s fellowship, for example, will allow her to study commercial revitalization through the lens of small businesses. An assistant professor of urban planning at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, she wants to know more about how neighborhood-based small business owners organize and what incentives there may be for them to act collectively.

Working together “goes against the conventional notion of entrepreneurs as being these rugged individuals,” but small business owners have done so when there is a threat of displacement or crime, Sutton says. Her research will investigate what other factors might trigger collective action or organizing among businesses, and how that fits into commercial revitalization. “We use the same nomenclature to categorize various forms of neighborhood business development. We really don’t have a clear sense, or much empirical work, that focuses on neighborhood-based small businesses, how and when they change, and implications for communities,” she says. Sutton, who joined Columbia in 2006, is also working on a book about small businesses in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y.

The beach towns of Jaco, Costa Rica, and Sayulita, Mexico, are at the center of Clara Irazábal’s research exploring the particulars of coastal real-estate tourist development and planning. Irazábal, who joined Columbia in August 2008 as assistant professor of international urban planning from University of Southern California, chose the two cities because both have seen a recent spike in tourism and real estate development. There are lessons to be learned, says Irazábal, from examining the two towns’ rapid, unplanned growth and some of the negative effects poor development practices have had on multiple fronts, including their natural environment, the towns’ infrastructures and affordable housing. “It has become painfully evident that in too many cases not only is tourist development not benefiting the locals,” she says, “but it is often exacerbating social inequalities while causing fundamental damages to the natural and cultural assets which serve as tourist attractions in the first place.” Irazábal will examine ways proper planning can satisfy environmental and economic needs as well as respect the city’s cultural identity.

While living in Alaska, Mark Preston worked as a manager in child welfare services, and he began thinking about the work environment, a process that brought him to his current studies on work motivation and stress in human service and social service organizations. The fellowship will support a new laboratory experiment and field survey to determine the interactive effects of task complexity, job control and goal-oriented feedback on work-related stress and motivation. Preston’s ultimate research objective is to help public sector and social service organizations create a work environment that improves worker well-being by minimizing stress and maximizing work motivation. “If you can handle people’s stress, you don’t need to deal with [employees] burning out,” adds Preston, assistant professor of social work. “Why wait for the person to get into an accident and send them to the emergency room if you could do things preventively?”

An integral component of Stavroula Kousteni’s research focuses on age-related bone loss that is not due to estrogen deficiency, which begins in women as early as their mid-40s. Her lab has already found common mechanisms linking the biology of aging with the development of osteoporosis. One major aspect in this process, says Kousteni, is the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), small molecules that during levels of high stress can cause a failure of the cells that fight oxidative stress. The diversity fellowship will allow her to do a study that looks for a link between pathways that regulate oxidative stress and longevity and bone mass under the control of a protein called Sirtuin1 and its target FoxO1, which both modify ROS. If the results are what she thinks, Kousteni says, this “may form a basis for a novel approach to osteoporosis therapy.”