The Faculty Research and Development committee announced Peters and Dabrowski as the sabbatical receipts on Tuesday morning.
Toddie Peters and Jen Dabrowski were both awarded full-pay sabbaticals for the entire 2022-23 academic year.
In 2008, Elon awarded its first full-year, full-pay sabbatical, a highly competitive award for one faculty member who has proposed a substantial and significant project and shows evidence of an ongoing record of excellence in scholarship.
Peters, professor of religious studies, will be working on her project titled “Listening to Women about Abortion and Religion.” She will address the question of how do religiously identified people understand the meaning and value of their decisions to end a pregnancy. Although the overwhelming cultural narrative is that religion is opposed to abortion, nearly two-thirds of women who have abortions identify as religious.
In collaboration with a multi-institutional team of scholars with expertise in various religious traditions, Peters will be conducting hundreds of qualitative interviews with religiously identified women who have had abortions in an effort to understand how this decision is made within the context of their lives as religious people. This full-year, full-pay sabbatical will support the collection and analysis of this data, as well as the creation of public-facing scholarship on this topic.
Dabrowski, assistant professor of chemistry and A.L Hook Professor of Science and Mathematics, will use the sabbatical to work on her project “Sustainable Access to Medicine: Developing Catalysts and Methods with Metals and Biorenewable Resources.”
Many medicines are produced from petroleum-derived substances, but in a world with limited supplies of crude oil, there is a need for the development and creation of medicines from more sustainable, biorenewable resources. This full-year, full-pay sabbatical will support the completion of two of Dabrowski’s ongoing research projects with Elon undergraduates—one on the conversion of sugars to precursors for medicinal compounds, and a second on the structure and properties of metal-antibiotic compounds. This sabbatical will also support Dabrowski partnership with the Malcomson Lab at Duke University, where she will be investigating the catalytic potential of novel metal compounds and completing an application for National Science Foundation funding.
Recipients of this highly competitive award have included David Crowe (2009-10), Charles Irons (2010-11), Cindy Fair (2011-12), Victoria Fischer Faw (2012-13), Barbara Miller (2013-14), Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler (2014-15), Ben Evans (2015-16), Kirstin Ringelberg (2016-17), Tom Mould (2017-18), Vickie Moore (2018-19), Ann Cahill (2019-20), Chris Richardson (2020-2021) and Rena Zito (2020-2021).