SENIOR SABBATICAL FELLOWSHIP AWARDS
2017–2018
The H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life supports the Senior Sabbatical Fellowship Program, which increases tenured faculty members’ salaries for one semester of leave from 80 to 100 percent. The fellowships are competitive, and they are awarded by the dean of the faculty and the Committee of Six once their recommendations are approved by the president and the trustees. The following are summaries of the 2017–2018 fellowship recipients’ research projects.
Michèle Barale, Thalheimer Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Research Project: Cather Composed: Photographic Portraits
The third chapter, planned for fall and spring, 2017–2018, aims to examine two formal and two candid photographic images of Cather, which were taken when she was a young journalist, first in living in Pittsburgh, both editing and writing for The Women’s Home Companion, and then in New York, as managing editor of McClure’s Magazine, a high-end publication. Cather’s portraits, both formal and vernacular, show her as a New Woman: High-collared and neck-tied, hair swept up in a “Gibson Girl,” plain, straight skirt and form-fitting shirt waist. She is at her desk in one, phone in hand. In another she sits in the studio with her upper body canted energetically forward. In a third, candid, she is pumping the handle bars of a small self-propelled train car (possibly on the Burlington line), the prairie behind her; she is back in Nebraska for some reason. Cather’s literary production at this time is an interesting mixture of Jamesian imitation and some of her most successful early stories. She is still experimenting with narrative voice, but she is also becoming “Willa Cather”: her stories are about artists (actors and musicians) and her narrator is oblique, never fully known to us (in fact, at time it is difficult to be certain if the narrator is male or female), and often present to tell the story of another character rather than his or her own. The artists are of interest in these stories since with only a couple of exceptions they are female. What is most striking in the earliest stories is Cather’s use of gender. Sharon O’Brien, one of the few critics to pay serious attention to Cather’s earliest stories, reads gender here as reflecting Cather’s efforts to separate fully from her mother and find artistic energy apart from maternal intimacy. It is a psycho-sexual explanation of the stories that seems interesting but reductive. It is more useful to watch the beginnings of a pattern of narrative authority—a male narrator who observes a woman who is herself either art object or artist; Cather gets to be instigator of the story twice: she is its creator and its subject, both the lover and the beloved.
Javier Corrales, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science
Research Project: After Legalization, Then What? Societal Backlash and Institutional Inertia in the Struggle for LGBT Rights in Latin America
Professor Corrales will use his fellowship to support field trips to the region to continue research on the causes of expansion of LGBT rights and to begin work on a new focus: the effects of LGBT expansion. For the past six years, he has been working on the causes of legalization of LGBT rights. The next step is to study what comes after legalization, specifically the question, under what conditions will countries observe a conservative backlash. Professor Corrales’s own preliminary research indicates that, following legalization of LGBT rights, two paths are common. One is politicized backlash; the other is institutional inertia. Funding will cover field work in Colombia (to study mostly politicized backlash) and Argentina (to study mostly institutional inertia).
Nicola Courtright, William McCall Vickery ’57 Professor of the History of Art
Research Project: Art and Queenly Authority: The Creation of Spaces for Marie de’ Medici
Royal art and architecture that burgeoned in France after the bitterly divisive religious wars of the sixteenth century, thanks to the ascent of a visionary head of the new Bourbon dynasty, Henry IV, who gave a surprisingly visible place to his Florentine queen, Marie de’ Medici. Despite historical opposition in France to investing a queen, especially one of foreign birth, with political authority, this book contends that spaces and places the queen inhabited show that the king and his advisers and then the queen herself strategically developed a legitimate place for a queen in the monarchic structure. Examining the art and architecture of the galleries, chambers, and gardens at Fontainebleau, the Louvre, and the dowager queen’s Luxembourg Palace, this book contests the familiar narrative that politics and art were dedicated to shaping an image of the singular, unifying, centralized, absolutist power of the king, the head of state, who ruled alone. It also demonstrates how imagery, often more effectively than texts, contributes a powerful message to political discourse that can lend clout to figures who were not ordinarily in positions of authority. Unusually, it tracks the imagery of the entire career of Marie de’ Medici promoting her as a virtuous and even sanctified ruler from the beginning of her political life, when she married Henri IV, to the end of it, when she was finally exiled by her son.
Francis Couvares, E. Dwight Salmon Professor of History and American Studies (with M. Saxton)
Research Project: Rationale and Proposal for a Ninth Edition of Interpretations of American History
The Interpretations of American History (IAH) brand is venerable and highly esteemed by colleagues in American history. Although never destined to be a best seller, it has a loyal following and continues to earn the respect of colleagues and of new generations of advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Its chapter format is unique: long historiographical essays written by Professors Couvares and Saxton, followed by brief, excerpted readings by distinguished historians whose views on the chapter’s topic differ in some important ways. Most of these historians have written their contributions in recent years. Together, the historiographical essays and excerpts offer students an invaluable entrée into the key debates that animate the historical profession today. They also offer insight into the art and science of historical research and the nature of historical interpretation. Professors Couvares and Saxton took over IAH from its founding authors, George Billias and the late Gerald Grob, in the seventh h edition (2000). Completely rewriting most of the essays, and substantially editing the rest, they also added new chapters. Again, in the eighth edition (2009), they rewrote and added chapters. Thus, in each edition readers learn about the most current debates that professional historians encounter, while at the same time gaining a sense of the long arc of interpretation. Keeping current with the literature is a crucial part of the IAH strategy—as it is of the historiographical training of advanced students of history. In the last two editions Professors Couvares and Saxton added chapters on such new topics as American Indians, immigration, the women’s movement, and the new Right. In the ninth edition, they are adding a new chapter on environmental history, which will familiarize readers of IAH with the most important work in a booming field of scholarship. In other chapters, new readings will take the place of older selections. At this point, only a couple of readings that had appeared in the sixth edition remain in the eighth, and even fewer will remain in the ninth. The authors will continue to “internationalize” the treatment of topics, especially in fields such as slavery and environmental history, where scholarship has become—like its subjects—transnational. In many other fields, even ones usually approached from a national perspective, such as the New Deal, transatlantic and comparative treatments increasingly shape scholarship. Professors Couvares and Saxton will continue to incorporate these trends.
Amy Demorest, Professor of Psychology
Research Project: Studies on the Use of Emotional Memories to Relieve Negative Emotions
Professor Amy Demorest will devote her sabbatical to two studies on the use of emotional memories to relieve negative emotions. In both studies, participants will be induced to feel a negative emotion by recalling an autobiographical emotional experience (sad or anxious); thereafter they will be induced to feel a different emotion by recalling a different experience (e.g., happy). Professor Demorest will examine the extent to which the original negative emotion is relived, based on the type of emotion in the second memory and the type of event in the second memory. These studies constitute “translational research,” research that adopts experimental controls to conduct laboratory analogs of clinical phenomena. That is, the results will inform us about the efficacy of different means for addressing clinical problems such as depression and generalized anxiety disorder. At the same time, the results will inform us about the basic nature of emotions in identifying which types of emotions and events are antidotes to sadness versus anxiety.
John Drabinski, Charles Hamilton Houston ’15 Professor of Black Studies
Research Project: Black Power, Black Panther: Necropolitics and the Militant Vernacular Intellectual
This book project, tentatively entitled “Black Power, Black Panther: Necropolitics and the Militant Vernacular Intellectual,” treats key figures in the Black Power and Black Panther movements, with special attention to Robert F. Williams, Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael), and Huey Newton. Broadly, the book is a theoretical treatment of these figures, drawing out the philosophical dimensions of their writings and critical practice. Two frames structure the project. The first is Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, which describes the production of disposable, killable populations as constitutive of anti-Black racist societies. This frame raises a series of questions. How can Black Power and Black Panther figures be read as responding to the necropolitical? Is revolutionary struggle, in these figures, simply a repetition of necropolitics or a break from it? How do controversies over cultural production and its place in liberation struggle reflect a necropolitical structure of critical engagement? And how does militant theorizing break with death as the horizon of liberation? The second frame is that of the vernacular intellectual. This term is borrowed from Grant Farred, who in his groundbreaking work What’s My Name? develops the dialectical (and anti-dialectical) notion of the Black intellectual as a vernacular figure – one who draws on the language of Black life in order to remake the world of ideas, theory, and critical practice. Infusing this notion of the vernacular intellectual with the militancy of Black Power and Black Panther thinkers, we see how it is possible to re-found philosophy and philosophical practice on revolutionary grounds. That is, militancy is not simply a stance, but instead a mood and guiding structure of thinking that contests received ideas of the intellectual, while also transforming the vernacular structure of theory and practice. What emerges from these two frames is a genuinely new and innovative reading of key figures in the Black radical tradition, a reading that takes them seriously as theorists of Black life and mobilization while also staying close to the concrete demands and practices of liberation struggle.
Alexander George, Rachel and Michael Deutch Professor of Philosophy
Research Project: Reflections on Wittgenstein: “Wittgenstein's Problem” and “Sraffa's Stimulus”
The Austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. This project involves completion of two essays on his thought. The first, “Wittgenstein's Problem,” seeks to understand the terms of criticism Wittgenstein deploys against philosophy. And the second, “Sraffa's Stimulus,” seeks to clarify the nature of the “anthropological” turn given to Wittgenstein’s reflections by his conversations with the Cambridge economist, Piero Sraffa.
Robert Hayashi, Associate Professor of American Studies
Research Project: Yinz Got Game?: Sports in the Steel City
This work explores the social, cultural, environmental, and economic history of the greater Pittsburgh region from the late 1800s to the present through the lens of sport. The author reveals the multifarious ways that individuals, groups, and institutions have used sports there to shape regional, class, ethnic and racial identities. He charts the city’s evolution from a booming industrial metropolis, defined by massive immigration, to a post-industrial Rust Belt city with a mostly static and increasingly aging populace. Throughout the work, the author intertwines personal narrative within the larger exposition of Pittsburgh’s history, recounting his experiences as a local athlete (soccer player and angler), passionate sports fan, and third-generation Japanese American.
Jerome Himmelstein, Winthrop H. Smith 1916 Professor of Sociology
Research Project: The Marijuana Legalization Movement, the Cannabis Industry, and Media Discourse
Drawing primarily on data already granted, the sociologist will write three papers examining respectively the professionalization of the marijuana legalization movement, the relationship between the movement and the cannabis industry, and the impact of movement success on media discourse.
Nicholas Horton, Professor of Statistics
Research Project: Case Studies in Quantitative Environmental Science
The world faces dramatic environmental challenges, and we need to train the next generation of students to be able to understand, evaluate, quantify, and communicate on a broad spectrum of issues, such as climate change, resource degradation, and biodiversity. The Amherst College Environmental Studies Program calls for students to have the basic statistical and quantitative background to evaluate research in this area, to ensure their ability to engage with these questions. A special issue of a journal will include a series of twelve to eighteen case studies of interest to students. These case studies would be motivated by research projects by faculty and students at Amherst as well as the Five Colleges. They would be set at a variety of levels, including material that is a precursor to a statistics course, material that could support an introductory statistics course, material that could support a second course, as well as more advanced topics. Each case study would begin with background information on the example, a description of the statistical or mathematical problem, and characterization of statistical approaches that are useful in this setting. Code to fit models and graphical displays, as well as annotated output and interpretation, would accompany each case study.
Scott Kaplan, Professor of Computer Science
Research Project: Efficient Memory Hierarchy Analysis for Real Workloads
Professor Kaplan will perform a broad analysis of memory hierarchies in computer systems based on real workloads. A computer's memory hierarchy—its combination of RAM, flash storage, and hard disk drive —substantially dictate the performance of that computer system. Depending on the type of programs that a system runs, as well as the data on which those programs operate, the demand on these memory devices can vary significantly. Therefore, there is no one ideal configuration of these memory devices, and it is often unclear how much of each type of memory device a computer system should be given. By recording the memory usage of real systems, running real programs on real data, Professor Kaplan will be able to simulate a wide range of possible memory configurations. Analysis of these simulations will show the effect of and sensitivity to the memory hierarchy’s arrangement. By additionally gathering historical data on the speed, capacity, and price of each of these devices, he will be able to project future memory characteristics and performance effects. Such analysis would provide substantial guidance to systems researchers and to memory device developers. Finally, he will freely distribute these analytic tools so that those with novel
Ronald Lembo, Edward N. Ney ’46 Professor in American Institutions
Research Project: Dilemmas of Diversity
The project examines the changing institutional and cultural discourse that accompanied race- and class-based diversification at elite colleges and universities in the United States, from the mid-1960s to the present. Amherst serves as a focal point for sociological analysis of these broader changes. Research begins with black student protests at Amherst following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and traces, through the present, the changing institutional and cultural discourse at the college, paying particular attention to ways it both mirrored and departed from the society-wide shift from “affirmative action” to “diversity and inclusion.”
Helen Leung, George H. Corey 1888 Professor of Chemistry
Research Project: Evaluating the Contributions of Electrostatics, Steric Effects, and Dispersion to Intermolecular Interactions
The goal of this sabbatical leave is to develop more fully the understanding of intermolecular interactions, how they are affected by, and in turn how they affect the first encounters between molecules. The activities involve conducting research at Amherst, both experimentally and theoretically, to investigate the structures of a series of gas-phase dimeric complexes (haloethylene-protic acid complexes) to ascertain the competition among the various forces between molecules; visiting the laboratories of leading scientific colleagues to learn novel methods to apply to these molecular systems; preparation of manuscripts for publication; and preparation of a National Science Foundation renewal grant.
Mark Marshall, Class of 1959 Professor of Chemistry
Research Project: Laser Ablation Source for a Chirped Pulse Fourier Transform Microwave Spectrometer Applied to Catalytically Relevant Systems
A laser ablation source will be installed in the Amherst College chirped pulse Fourier transform microwave spectrometer to enable the study of metal containing complexes, which will be used as models to probe metal-adsorbate interactions important in catalytic systems. The proposed work will connect previous results using helium nanodroplet spectroscopy to predictions from quantum chemistry and characterize olefin-tin interactions important to the Stille reaction. To gain relevant practical experience in joining the two techniques of laser ablation and Fourier transform microwave spectroscopy, Professor Marshall will visit the laboratories of two pioneers in the field, Dr. Jen-Uwe Grabow of Hannover University and Professor Nicholas Walker of Newcastle University. Professor Marshall will also spend time in the research group of Professor Ann McCoy at the University of Washington to expand his knowledge of the discrete variable representation (DVR) method that has been the focus of much of the work of his recent senior thesis students in his ongoing studies of the large amplitude motions in weakly bound molecular complexes.
Lyle McGeoch, Brian E. Boyle ’69 Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
Research Project: Data Structures and Algorithms for Graph Problems
Professor McGeoch will explore data structures and algorithms for graphs. His focus will include dynamic graphs, streaming models, and transit routing.
Ingrid Nelson, Associate Professor of English
Research Project: Premodern Media and the Canterbury Tales
This book project explores the meanings of “media” in premodern England, examining the significance of ideas of mediation in a culture without machine technologies. Its central claim is that premodern media—a diverse array of objects and actions including bodies, voices, images, documents, and tale-telling—not only shape but in fact constitute medieval literature. It will offer new and newly synthesized research on medieval philosophical, social, and legal theories of media, and use these as lens through which to read Chaucer’s major poems, the Canterbury Tales and the House of Fame. The book’s chapters are organized around concepts from medieval as well as modern media theory, such as remediation and networks. Each chapter uses these concepts to inform a close reading of a Chaucerian text, and to demonstrate how medieval theories of mediation can contribute to “new” media theory.
John Rager, Professor of Computer Science
Research Project: Machine Learning and Renaissance Plays
This project seeks to apply an array of machine learning techniques to the analysis and classification of renaissance play texts.
Jason Robinson, Associate Professor of Music
Research Project: Improvisation, Recording, and Resounding the African Diaspora
Professor Robinson’s sabbatical work includes three recording projects and two scholarly projects. His recordings will feature a new quartet version of his New York-based Janus Ensemble, an improvisatory project with European collaborators, and the conclusion of his “Cerberus” trilogy of recordings. He also plans to complete two scholarly projects: his book “(Re)Sounding the African Diaspora: Jazz, Improvisation, and Musical Transnationalisms,” and a guest edited double issue of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes Critique en Improvisation titled “Improvisation and the Liberal Arts.”
Paul Rockwell, Henry C. Folger 1879 Professor of French
Research Project: The Promise of Laughter: Arthurian Literature and the Evolution of Medieval Law
Professor Rockwell will conduct research for a study of the evolution of Arthurian French romance at the dawn of the thirteenth century and its relation to evolving juridical concepts that were debated and defined during the same period.
Christian Rogowski, G. Armour Craig Professor in Language and Literature
Research Project: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke: Film, Cross-Cultural Transfer and the Politics of Memory
The project explores the collaboration by Oscar-nominated German film maker Wim Wenders (born 1945), a leading figure of the “New German Cinema,” and Austrian writer Peter Handke (born 1942), mainly known for his experimental, often enigmatic plays. The two men bonded in the mid-1960s and have collaborated on at least five joint film projects, culminating in the recent release of The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (premiered in Venice in 2016). The main focus will be on their most important joint work, Der Himmel über Berlin (literally, “The Sky/Heaven over Berlin,” released internationally as Wings of Desire, 1987). The film’s poetic conceit, involving two angels who bear witness to people’s everyday lives and aspirations in the divided city while freely crossing from one to the other side of the Wall, makes for a multi-layered film that addresses a wide variety of complex issues. These include the lingering impact of National Socialism; the Cold War division of Germany; the reintegration into German cultural life of emigrés returning from exile; the politics of remembrance; film and historical witnessing; the possibility of understanding and love between men and women; questions of childhood dreams and emotional fulfillment; interpersonal relations in an alienated and alienating post-modern urban landscape; and a wrought ambivalence concerning the impact of Anglo-American popular culture on contemporary German society. Research for this project will be conducted at various film archives in Germany (such as the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv Berlin; Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin; Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main), and, perhaps, Vienna (Filmarchiv Austria) and Paris (Cinémathèque Française).
Eric Sawyer, Professor of Music
Research Project: Premiere Performances of The Scarlet Professor, New Duo Piano Composition
This proposal seeks support for compositional and production work towards premiere performances of the The Scarlet Professor, a new opera by Professor Sawyer, a composter, and librettist Harley Erdman. The production is scheduled as the Five College opera during two weekends in September 2017 and will involve two casts: guest professional artists the first weekend and students and recent alumni under the visitors’ mentorship the second. Performances will take place in Theater 14 at Smith College. The Scarlet Professor is based on the true story of Newton Arvin, a nationally renowned literary critic and English professor at Smith College, who was arrested in 1960 for possessing “beefcake” pornography. This proposal also includes a new compositional project, a work for duo pianists Randall Hodgkinson and Lois Shapiro conceived to share a program with Stravinksky's The Rite of Spring as part of their ongoing Stravinsky Project.
Krupa Shandilya, Associate Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Research Project: The Poetics of Revolution: Gendered Nationalisms in Contemporary South Asian Cinema
“The Poetics of Revolution: Gendered Nationalisms in Contemporary South Asian Cinema” argues that the poetry and fiction of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) (1935–1947), a literary-political association greatly influenced by Marxist thought and committed to a more egalitarian, class-less society, is “re-mediated” into song, in particular, in recent Bollywood cinema from India and mainstream cinema from Pakistan. Reading this popular mass entertainment against the grain, Professor Shandilya suggests it resists the regressive nationalisms and repressive sexual politics of India and Pakistan through its use of Progressive literature. In doing so, this cinema adapts and forwards the politics of the PWA in contemporary South Asian visual culture. The book argues that this cinema contests the gendered nationalisms that undergird the foundation of India and Pakistan after the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. It traces a historical arc from the Partition to more contemporary political issues that are in many ways a legacy of the Partition—the Kashmir conflict, Pakistan’s enmeshment in the war on terror and, finally, the rise of the Hindu right in India and its consequent reinstatement of regressive laws relating to minority subjects. This critique of hegemonic gendered nationalisms opens new possibilities for how we understand subcontinental politics. Through readings of this cinema, the book suggests a utopic feminist-queer politics that strives for a more egalitarian society and embraces diverse expressions of gender, sexuality, class, and religion.
Robert Sweeney, William R. Mead Professor of Art
Research Project: Painterly Abstraction: Animation within the Tuscan Landscape
Professor Robert Sweeney is developing a new series of large paintings that will focus on the abstract relationships initially established in his on-site paint sketches from landscapes and interiors. These works will also incorporate memory and intuitive re-configuration of the composition in response to the developing painting, and an increasingly more active use of the language of the paint as a central element. Professor Sweeney will be attempting to strip further layers off of the surface and have his paintings reveal what his imagination has been drawn to in his “close reading” of the natural world. In that regard, his goal is to create an evocative series of paintings of nature not directly observed, but implied and remembered. In order to advance these goals, he will return to Tuscany in mid-September for an intensive five-week painting campaign. This will be his sixth trip to this region. Tuscany has served as his muse for most of his life as a painter. Professor Sweeney will return with the goal of continuing to be inspired by this special place in his quest to uncover the metaphorical seam that exists between the literal aspects of the landscape and the perceived animated qualities of light, color, pattern form, and space and to engage them in the language of paint. Upon his return to Amherst, he will develop a series of large paintings which will attempt to distill from the oil paint, pastel studies, and memory, the painterly discoveries of his Tuscan painting campaign.
Ethan Temeles, Thomas B. Walton, Jr. Memorial Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies
Research Project: Ecological Impacts of an Invasive Plant on a Specialized Plant-Pollinator System
Professor Temeles will examine the impact of a non-native, invasive plant, Heliconia wagneriana, on a pristine, highly-specialized plant-pollinator system consisting of the purple-throated carib hummingbird and its native Heliconia food plants, H. caribaea and H. bihai, on the island of Dominica, West Indies, during the spring of 2018. He will use a combination of field observations and experiments to map the geographical distribution of H. wagneriana on Dominica, conduct surveys of relative bird abundances between sites where H. wagneriana has invaded and sites where H. caribaea remains undisturbed in order to assess the impact of this invasive plant on native birds, and conduct pollination experiments of H. wagneriana in order to determine whether the plant requires bird pollination for successful pollination and the ability of native pollinators to serve as pollinators of this invasive Heliconia. The impact of invasive plants on native plants is becoming increasingly understood, but what is less clear is how invasive plants affect native pollinators. The proposed studies will capitalize on this opportunity in order to document the impact of an invasive plant on a pristine system early in the onset of invasion and will provide information of use to the government of Dominica for the control and management of this invasive plant.
Christopher van den Berg, Associate Professor of Classics
Research Project: Critical Turns: The Criticism, History, and Theory of Literature at Rome
Professor Christopher van den Berg plans to complete most of his book project, “Critical Turns: The Criticism, History, and Theory of Literature at Rome.” This book is a new interpretation of the main corpus of Roman literary-critical texts and argues for a thorough rethinking of how we regard the Roman tradition of literary evaluation. This book shows that ancient authors anticipated complex issues that endure to the present: canonization, periodization, the mediation between text and context, or the twin threats of presentism and antiquarianism; these authors also arrived at ingenious solutions that demand reconsideration by scholars and critics today. By offering a new framework for understanding the main corpus of Roman literary evaluation, it will rehabilitate oft-neglected works. “Critical Turns” will thus reshape the canon of classical criticism as it examines the nexus between literary creation and evaluation, political power, and cultural identity.
Patrick Williamson, Edward H. Harkness Professor of Biology
Research Project: Computational Approaches to the Structure of Phospholipid Translocases
Professor Williamson will undertake a computational approach to determining the basic structural features of a transport enzyme that operates in the membranes of eukaryotic cells. The protein transports phospholipids, the molecules that make up the membrane itself, and is a "heterodimer", i.e., it is a complex of two proteins of different size. He will produce a model of the larger of the two proteins in the heterodimer by taking computational advantage of its relationship to the known structures of related transporters. Professor Williamson will produce a model of the smaller of the two proteins, where there is no known structural homolog, by undertaking a statistical analysis of a large data set of sequences of this protein from different organisms. The validity of the resulting models can be tested against a limited, but experimentally reliable set of structural information as well as against results from evolutionary analysis. He will also create databases of carefully selected subsets of sequences from both proteins, and then use the same statistical analysis of these novel large databases to identify how these two proteins interact with other. Finally, he will use computational analysis of the structural information obtained by these methods to produce a combined three-dimensional model that depicts the structure of the heterodimer as a whole.