Faculty Awarded More than $1-million in Stimulus Money

Government Funds Research in Criminal Justice and Virtual Reality

Two faculty members in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences received government stimulus funds for research projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Faye Taxman, an administration of justice professor, received $1 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project that will test a rewards system in justice treatment programs.

Taxman’s project, "Using Rewards in Justice Treatment Programs: Technology & Contingency Management," is designed to develop knowledge about how technology can be used in criminal justice, drug treatment courts, and probation settings to assess performance, either at the individual client level or at the program level.

Maria Kozhevnikov, a psychology professor, received more than $54,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop tactics for implementing innovative 3-D simulations into undergraduate optical engineering laboratories and to explore how virtual reality helps students with different learning styles.

The recent ARRA ("stimulus") legislation provides a reported $8.2 billion in extramural funding to the NIH to help stimulate the U.S. economy through the advancement of scientific research. The NSF has also distributed major funding through this program.