The Storymodelers, an international collective of multidisciplinary researchers, are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded two prestigious Minerva Research Initiative grants, totaling around $3 million over the next three years. These highly competitive grants, funded by the US Department of Defense, will support innovative projects that push the boundaries of basic social science research and contribute to understanding critical global issues.
A Legacy of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Research
The Minerva Research Initiative is known for funding cutting-edge basic social science research that addresses key questions in areas such as security, stability, and resilience. This year, only 19 international projects were selected for funding, making The Storymodelers’ success particularly significant. With these two new grants, The Storymodelers have now secured four Minerva awards in the past five years, demonstrating our consistent leadership in transdisciplinary convergence research.
Previously, The Storymodelers were funded by Minerva on a project to understand how host communities receive and respond to sudden arrivals of migrants (2019-2023). Another ongoing Minerva project is looking at how different disciplinary perspectives come together to construct an understanding of safety and security in hard-to-reach environments, using slums and informal settlements as case studies (2022-2025). These projects seeded the research partnerships that have led to the most recent two new awards.
Introducing the Projects: Advancing Knowledge in Societal Resilience and Temporal Orientation
Our new projects, UN-RESILIENCE: Drawing Insights from Societal Collapse and BEYOND THE CLOCK: Understanding Cross-Cultural Temporal Orientation of Military Officers, embody The Storymodelers’ and our research partners’ commitments to interdisciplinary, collaborative, convergent research.
BEYOND THE CLOCK (Principal Investigator: Erika Frydenlund; $1.62 million) will explore how cultural conceptions of time influence military strategy, using arts-based methods such as poetry workshops and theatre activities. This innovative approach will advance theories of temporal orientation and cross-cultural communication, while also integrating interdisciplinary methods, particularly from the arts and humanities. The project aims to train a cohort of students as embedded humanists within scientific teams, fostering a unique blend of humanities and science in addressing complex global challenges.
This research project is the first at this scale bridging humanities scholars at ODU’s College of Arts & Letters with computational scientists from Storymodelers at ODU’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center and Center for Mission Engineering.Â
UN-RESILIENCE (Principal Investigator: Jose J. Padilla; $1.57 million) will focus on identifying societal collapse by combining new and existing data sources through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). By studying how systems respond to shocks—whether they recover or fail to do so—this project aims to provide a novel theory and framework for measuring societal collapse and resilience. The research will generate scalable datasets and an index that embraces diverse global perspectives, contributing to a deeper understanding of resilience in various contexts.
This project solidifies the connection between Storymodelers at Old Dominion University (USA) and Universidad del Norte (Colombia), allowing our team to capitalize on the expertise gained in the previous Absorptive Capacity Minerva-funded project and expanding the team to include new partnerships with Hampton University and the ODU Graduate School.
Collaborative Efforts Across Disciplines and Institutions
The Storymodelers’ success is rooted in our collaborative, interdisciplinary, and convergent approach, which brings together experts from a wide range of fields. We are thrilled to receive these two new Minerva grants to expand our collective of researchers who represent departments and institutions with which we have yet to collaborate on funded projects.
Researchers on these projects represent disciplines including engineering, computer science, modeling & simulation, statistics, international relations, political science, instructional design & technology, philosophy, and world languages & cultures.
Faculty from Old Dominion University (ODU) play a key role in these projects, with participants from the Virginia Modeling, Analysis & Simulation Center (VMASC), the Center for Mission Engineering, the College of Arts & Letters, and the Graduate School. We are also partnering with institutions worldwide, including Universidad del Norte in Colombia, Hampton University in the USA, the University of Agder in Norway, and the Joint Forces Staff College in the USA.
Looking Ahead: Training the Next Generation of Researchers
One of the most exciting aspects of these projects is the opportunity they provide for hands-on research training. Graduate and undergraduate students will work at the intersection of qualitative, quantitative, and computational modeling domains, gaining invaluable experience that will prepare them for leadership roles in the future.
A Commitment to Pushing Boundaries
The Storymodelers are honored to receive these Minerva Research Initiative grants and are excited to embark on these groundbreaking projects. Our work in societal resilience and temporal orientation will contribute not only to the academic community but also to practical applications that address pressing global challenges.
We invite you to follow our progress as we explore new frontiers in social science research. For more information on our projects or to learn how you can get involved, please follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram at @Storymodelers or sign up for updates on our website, www.storymodelers.org.
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