Associate Professor of History and Environmental Science Matthew Klingle was recently awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's prestigious New Directions Fellowship, which was presented to only 15 scholars nationwide.
"I was incredibly surprised and happy that I got the nomination from campus, and I was absolutely floored that I got it on the national level," said Klingle.
Created to promote high-level cross-disciplinary research, the New Directions grant supports humanities and social science scholars who wish to engage in new research that will require considerable training in disciplines other than their own.
Klingle's new research focuses on the environmental causes of chronic diseases, particularly diabetes.
"I want to follow changes in the landscape, changes in our medical understanding of the disease as well as the disease itself, and then how those play out in particular communities, especially those communities that have been at the forefront of the rising rates of diabetes, namely native peoples, African Americans and the rural and urban poor," Klingle said.
In order to fully understand the complex nature of chronic diseases like diabetes, Klingle will work with his colleagues at Bowdoin, faculty at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health as well as biomedical authorities in Maine to gain a sufficient knowledge of biomedicine, public health and medical history and ethics.
Although he is not personally afflicted by chronic disease, Klingle said he is often asked if he has a personal stake in his research.
"I am not a diabetic," he said, "but the thing about chronic diseases is that we're all at risk, some more so than others, which is one of the more vexing, more complicated and ultimately one of the more exciting things about this: to find out why some more than others."