Although professors spend much of their time in front of the classroom teaching, they are, at heart, lifelong learners. This year, about 40 UR faculty members were approved to put their teaching duties on hold to pursue sabbatical projects. The time allows them to focus on advancing their fields of study, expand their knowledge, and at a later date, share new techniques, research, and findings with their students.

Jennifer Nourse, associate professor of anthropology

Jennifer Nourse has long been fascinated by Southeast Asian culture and identity, which led to immersive, hands-on research in Indonesia during the 1980s. Nourse’s sabbatical project focuses on preserving the Lauje language, spoken by a remote Indonesian community with whom she lived for years. The once unwritten language is spoken by fewer people today, making preservation critical.

“I found someone who had been a translator for the Dutch years before, and I paid him to help me learn,” said Nourse, who is one of the few people in the world who still speaks Lauje. She has created the first-ever Lauje dictionary and hopes to collaborate on future projects with an Indonesian linguist and Lauje students, who are attending university in Indonesia.

“My students are really eager, excited, and interested in endangered languages, so I think whatever I am teaching, I can find a way to include this project,” Nourse said.

Matthew Lowder, associate professor of psychology

Matthew Lowder is exploring how language processing works in the human brain. Lowder’s past experiments have relied on eye tracking to investigate how participants process written language, but during his sabbatical, he plans to expand this to spoken language, by using eye-tracking technology to instead study how participants integrate auditory input and visual images during language comprehension.

“I plan to learn some of the most up-to-date statistical approaches for analyzing eye-tracking data, which will allow me to best capture how spoken sentence processing changes on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis.”

Lowder is also collaborating with a colleague at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea to examine bilingual language processing in Korean-English speakers. He’s also reviving a project from 2021 on how individuals who score high on a measure of autistic personality characteristics process sarcastic versus literal language. His work will provide valuable hands-on experience, especially for the students in his research lab.

“This is going to be so relevant for students who want to go on to graduate school and show that they've had this deep dive into advanced eye tracking techniques and advanced statistical analysis,” said Lowder.

B. Daniel Pierce, associate professor of biology

B. Daniel Pierce found his passion in microbiology. Now, he’s putting his expertise to work in a collaboration with Hardywood Park Craft Brewery. Pierce’s project aims to improve the identification of contaminants that can hinder the brewing process, using UR’s labs to go beyond the standard tests.

“I’m particularly interested in what species of contaminants they encounter,” Pierce said. “There’s a quick test that can be done to determine if something is contaminated, but the test provides just a yes or a no. It doesn’t tell you what is actually causing the problem. Our labs offer ways to further identify those contaminants.”

Another part of Pierce’s sabbatical will focus on his ongoing research into pathogenic soil bacterium that cause tumors in plants. Learning more could result in the eventual creation of drought- and heat-resistant crops.

“Changes to DNA that cause abnormal growth is the common link between human cancers and plant tumors. The bacterium that cause these changes has been used to create transgenic plants,” said Pierce. “We’re learning so much more all the time. It’s an exciting field to be in.”

Brittany Nelson, associate professor of photography and extended media

Brittany Nelson found her creative outlet in photography, particularly in 19th- and 20th-century handmade processes. Her work manipulates the chemical processes involved in development, creating abstract images that may seem overexposed or blurry to the naked eye but are, in fact, works of art.

“The fun part about being an artist is that you can take all of these pieces and you don’t necessarily have to put the puzzle together,” Nelson said. “You just get close enough so that the viewers can put it together themselves.”

During her sabbatical, Nelson was granted permission to scale 483 feet of the largest, fully steerable telescope in the world at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. Admittedly afraid of heights, Nelson fearlessly took freight elevators and catwalks to go into the telescope to capture video and photos for a future exhibit.   

Not the type of artist who creates for the moment, she says she wants her work to speak to generations to come and have a lifelong impact. “I'm discovering things that directly relate to the photography darkroom like technical things, and then I streamline everything and make it helpful. I work a bit like a scientist in the lab.”