Over the past month, the National Science Foundation gave WSU professors more than $650,000 total to pursue research in business, anthropology and sociology.

WSU College of Business professors Saonee and Suprateek Sarker have been awarded $352,476, which will go to study how people balance their work and personal lives.

“Certain jobs are so demanding with today’s high pressure environment,” Saonee said. “It makes balancing work and home life difficult.” The goal of the research is to understand the effects of working overtime in international businesses, she said. Global organizations must overcome time zone differences, language issues, differing methods of developing software and the ability to communicate in a virtual setting.

“Some individuals are more susceptible to the imbalance,” Saonee said. “We are trying to figure out if it is the project itself, the person, the organization or the policies.” Most businesses realize that the amount of work to complete these projects is cutting into family time and decreasing efficiency in the work place. “When business spills over into family time, the efficiency level is not there,” she said. “There is low job satisfaction, and commitment goes down.” Saonee said she plans to discuss the results from this project to her management information systems students. The NSF also funded WSU archaeologist and evolutionary anthropologist Karen Lupo to lead a multi-institutional research project to build a record of Central African Republic’s rainforest.

Lupo received $181,701 from the NSF to map the evolution of the rainforest by collecting fossil and sub-fossil evidence. “We’re looking at climatic change and the ecology of the rainforest to figure out what humans may have done over the years,” Lupo said.

One goal of the study is to answer the unknown question of how long humans have been present in the rainforest.

“One school believes humans have only been around the last 2,000 years,” she said. “While others predict humans have been around tens of thousands. I’m hoping we can pinpoint that time down.” The project will begin in January 2010 and is estimated to last about two years, she said. The information gathered will be placed in a Web-based learning module. Lupo said she plans to use the newly attained information in her introductory anthropology courses.

The third grant went to WSU sociologist Erik Johnson, who studies groups engaged in protection of natural resources, wildlife, environmental health and justice advocacy.

NSF gave Johnson $150,000 to work with a team of WSU undergraduate research assistants to accumulate information to examine international movements of these groups.

“I have recently been researching social movements and the passing of U.S. congressional laws concerning environmental protection issues,” Johnson said. “But the data can be used for a wide variety of issues.” All of the information gathered will be available on an interactive Web site intended for researchers, teachers, and students. The Web site takes information from a time-series database, which is made up of yearly observations on various environmental groups, and compares it to U.S. information.

“You can request what data you want from the Web site, and it will spit it back out to you,” he said. “I will definitely be using this in classroom curriculum.”