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3. Externally Funded Campus Projects to Reform Undergraduate and Graduate STEM Education

 

A Participatory Investigation of Learning in International Service Projects

National Science Foundation Award # 0935057
J. Bruce Elliot-Litchfield, Laura Hahn, Russell Korte
Agricultural and Biological Engineering

This engineering education research award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will employ researchers to investigate the learning mechanisms and benefits to engineering education of popular and rapidly expanding international service learning projects. These projects are believed to elicit many of the competencies for future engineers described as essential by the National Academy of Engineering and engineering education accreditation boards. The results of this research will enable the development and dissemination of research-based educational materials for project-centered service-learning experiences for engineers. It will also lead to the discovery of models and pedagogical approaches for incorporating key features of co-curricular international project work into the mainstream of instruction and curriculum reform. International projects may be a powerful means to provide preparation for professional practice, developing knowledge and competencies in meaningful contexts that are applicable for both domestic and international engineering projects. The acquisition of these competencies will better prepare engineering students to participate in a more globally competitive workforce.

Collaborative Research: Development of Concept Inventories for Computer Science

National Science Foundation Award # 0618589
Roger Minear, Craig Zilles, Michael Loui, Cinda Heeren
Computer Science

Person working at computer keyboard.This project is improving the assessment of student learning in computer science by developing three concept inventories for introductory computer science subjects. Modeled after the successful Force Concept Inventory that was developed to assess student learning of Newtonian physics, the concept inventories are testing understanding of key computer science concepts in a manner that enables reliable comparisons between courses at different universities. This multi-institution partnership among the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rose-Hulman Institute, and Washington University is helping to ensure the validity of the proposed instruments by providing access to diverse student populations and different program objectives. With a standardized assessment tool, the computer science education community can make meaningful comparisons of the effectiveness of different pedagogical approaches, greatly facilitating computer science education research.

Concept inventories are designed to test student comprehension of difficult concepts by forcing a choice between the correct answer and distractors constructed from common student misconceptions. As the primary source of information about which topics are difficult and about what the most common misconceptions are, students are being directly engaged through introspections, discussions, interviews, and “think alouds" to direct the development of questions for the concept inventories. These questions are then being refined and validated through peer review, qualitative, and psychometric analyses. An advisory panel, comprised of experienced concept inventory developers, is advising and annually assessing project progress.

CPATH EAE: iCUBED: Informatics and Computation throughout Undergraduate Baccalaureate Education

National Science Foundation Award # 0722327
Leonard Pitt, Eric Jakobsson, Deanna Raineri, Lori Kendall
Computer Science

This CPATH project develops, implements, and disseminates a transformational model that illuminates new pathways to careers in informatics for new communities. The iCUBED model is based on the notion that levels of engagement in computation can be viewed on a continuum from novice to very technical levels and that students from any discipline and point on the continuum should have courses and programs that meet their needs and discipline interests. The iCUBED model provides the inside reform within the computer science department, the interdisciplinary reform to infuse informatics into various disciplines, and the institutional reform to provide the administrative and infrastructure support for this transformation. The project includes the implementation of a campus-wide interdisciplinary informatics minor, student community building and engagement activities, discipline-specific and interdisciplinary workshops, and dissemination on a national level.

EESE: Role-Play Scenarios for Teaching Responsible Conduct of Research

National Science Foundation Award # 0628814
Michael Loui, Carolyn Kristina Gunsalus
Information Trust Institute

This award is made under Ethics Education in Science and Engineering Program (NSF06-524: “EESE: Role-Play Scenarios for Teaching Responsible Conduct of Research.”) The project will develop and assess role-play scenarios to teach graduate students in science and engineering the central topics in the responsible conduct of research. Together, the scenarios will cover plagiarism; authorship; conflict of interest; interpersonal conflicts in mentoring; and concerns about compliance with research regulations on human participants in research, animal subjects, or hazardous substances. Two scenarios will present potential whistle-blowing situations. Few previous studies have carefully assessed the effectiveness of role-play in teaching ethics. The project will conduct a rigorous, systematic assessment of role-play, using multiple methods, with a diverse group of graduate students. It will examine whether role-play helps students identify moral issues in research, understand multiple perspectives in ethical disputes, and negotiate practical solutions to moral problems.

EMSW21-MCTP: Research Experience for Graduate Students

National Science Foundation Award # 0838434
Steven Bradlow; John D'Angelo
Mathematics

The Mathematics Department at UIUC aims to train stewards of the mathematical enterprise. Our programs facilitate all stages of development from prospective undergraduate math major to senior mathematician. We propose here to enhance our REGS program and thereby impact several critical transitions at the graduate level. REGS stands for Research Experiences for Graduate Students”; for many students, REGS provides the initial contact with research. Our current program provides summer support for early graduate students to work (individually or in a group) on a research project with one or several faculty mentors. We propose here an enhanced program with four components: one for incoming Ph.D. students (REGS 0), one for 1st- and 2nd-year Ph.D. students (REGS 1), one for students who have already begun thesis research (REGS 2), and one for students about to complete their dissertations (REGS 3). The first three components are summer programs, while the fourth provides a year-long fellowship. We will extend the reach of our programs by including external participants in the REGS 0 and REGS 1 components. The external participants will include students from underrepresented minority groups and also from schools which do not have mathematics Ph.D. programs.

Enhancing Creative Capacity: How Engineering Students Learn Creativity

National Science Foundation Award # 0836024
J. Bruce Elliot-Litchfield, David Goldberg, Raymond Price
Agricultural and Biological Engineering

This Engineering Education Research project will examine the enhancement of personal creativity and determine how engineering students become more creative. Subjects will include first-year and fourth-year students and other students enrolled in classes on creativity. A variety of qualitative and quantitative methods will be used, including both third-party instruments and methods developed by the research team. The study proposes a theory of creativity enhancement based upon strategic and iterative creating, presentation, feedback, and reflection, nurturing creation to foster creativity. Applying a set of strategies in practice develops creative competence, while tasks that spiral back to familiar cognitive terrain promote confidence and development of creative identity. The understanding gained from the research about creativity enhancement will inform the teaching and learning process, particularly instructional design and methodology. The results will also provide a framework for the teaching and learning of creativity for large numbers of students and provide data to assist in decision making regarding whether development of creativity should earn a more established position in the engineering curriculum.

Enhancing Student Learning in Introductory Physics Through the Use of Multimedia Learning Modules

National Science Foundation Award # 0817185
Gary Gladding; Jose Mestre; Timothy Stelzer; Mats Selen
Physics

Physics multimedia moduleThis project addresses a documented and persistent problem in introductory physics instruction: Students taking introductory physics are loath to read the textbook prior to coming to class and are unprepared to participate in classroom activities aimed at refining conceptual understanding and promoting problem-solving skills. The project's Multimedia Learning Modules (MLM) for the two-semester, calculus-based introductory physics course incorporate established learning principles from research on multimedia learning by combining animated video with accompanying audio to engage students' auditory and visual working memories, which improves their mastery of the material. The MLM teach basic conceptual knowledge and are used with Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) to improve students' pre-class preparation, thus freeing up class time for other uses.

The impact of the MLM on learning are evaluated by developing a set of questions that are administered to students prior to coming to each lecture both before and after the MLM are implemented, and by comparing performance on secure final exams both before and after implementation of the MLM. The materials are also being tested at partner institutions that have a very dissimilar student demographic profile from the students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) Program

U.S. Department of Education Award # P200A090308
Steven Zimmerman
Chemistry

Our nation’s future economic, military, political, and moral vitality depends on its ability to educate its own citizens and permanent residents to assume leadership roles in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering. Among these, chemistry is a specific area of national need identified by the Secretary of Education. Therefore, the Department of Chemistry's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need program promotes the following objectives, to:

  • Mentor graduate fellows who are committed and talented educators to become leaders in the intellectual development of the field of chemistry.
  • Train graduate fellows to be technically preeminent chemists in all aspects of the discipline.
  • Train the next generation of chemists in the traditional areas of chemistry and, in particular, the new, emerging areas of the field, chemical biology and materials chemistry.
  • Join the vanguard of a curriculum reform that reflects the evolution of chemistry in the 21st Century.
  • Build on a long tradition of inclusion and integration of underrepresented groups in the Chemistry Program at Illinois.

The GAANN Chemistry Fellowships are primarily to recruit and retain new graduate students from historically underrepresented groups. Fellow selection includes an outstanding academic record, intellectual promise, and demonstrated financial need. A unique feature of our teaching program is a three-tiered, vertically integrated teacher-mentor system. The system links undergraduates in our highly successful Merit Program with beginning GAANN fellows who serve as instructors and mentors. Merit seeks to recruit, retain, and foster the academic success of traditionally underrepresented undergraduate students. The presence of GAANN fellows as Merit Workshop facilitators provides role models for undergraduates while also enriching fellows’ teaching experience. As GAANN fellows advance in the Ph.D. program, they serve as formal and informal mentors and tutors of beginning GAANN participants. All interactions build a support network, increasing retention and academic achievement at all levels. A key underlying program theme is that true gender and racial equality in the field of chemistry will not be achieved until the “pipeline issue” is solved: women and underrepresented minorities must obtain Ph.D. degrees from top chemistry programs and in proportion to their representation within the population.

Global Talent Development for Sustainable Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Fields

U.S. Department of Education Award P116M080003
K. Peter Kuchinke
Human Resource Education

This project establishes, implements, and evaluates a sustainable educational partnership between four leading research universities in the United States and Brazil. The goal of the research is increasing the level of competence in talent development among undergraduate and graduate students in agricultural and environmental science fields through in a student exchange setting. This project focuses on core talent development skills including leadership, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary collaboration, teamwork, and performance management, as well as domain-specific skills and knowledge in agricultural and environmental sciences by blending structured learning opportunities in human resources, business administration, and agricultural and environmental sciences.

IGERT: Neuroengineering—A Unified Educational Program for Systems Engineering and Neuroscience

National Science Foundation Award # 0903622
Douglas Jones, Robert Wickesberg, Monica Fabiani, Todd Coleman
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Beckman Institute

This Integrative Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) project will educate a diverse cadre of neuroscientists and engineers at the University of Illinois with an advanced understanding of both neuroscience and engineering, enabling them to engage in both sophisticated collaboration and independent research across the traditional gap between these domains. Many of the most important and exciting scientific and technological challenges for the future are centered on neuroscience, the study of the brain. Many recent (and most future) advances in understanding the brain depend on engineering new technologies for sensing, imaging, and analyzing the brain and their innovative use by neuroscientists. Similarly, some of the greatest and most important technological challenges, such as creating neural prostheses for the disabled, require engineers with a profound understanding of neuroscience. IGERT students will thus carry out innovative interdisciplinary research on neuroscience areas of great scientific and engineering importance, such as speech and audition; brain and imaging; neural implants that may lead to revolutionary advances in understanding the brain; and in new technologies, such as neural prostheses for the disabled. IGERT trainees will also receive training in leadership, communication skills, and the responsible conduct of research, as well as preparation for academic or industrial careers.

Illinois Cyber Security Scholar Program

National Science Foundation Award # 0830884
Roy Campbell, William Sanders, Masooda Bashir
Information Trust Institute

This project provides scholarships for students seeking undergraduate degrees in Information Assurance (IA). Each scholarship is for the last two years of a student's degree program. Students are engaged in team-based projects—motivated, for example, by the power grid, avionics systems, and enterprise computing—in which they build example applications using the latest computer security techniques. Upon graduation, scholarship recipients must work for a federal government agency in an IA position. This scholarship program is helping to address the nation's need for qualified information technology professionals working in government agencies. The project involves outreach to minorities and to two-year college transfer students.

Merit-Based Immersion for Students and Teachers: The MIST Model for Increasing STEM Involvement and Graduation

National Science Foundation Award # 0622573
James Lisy, Deanna Raineri, Tracey Hickox, Jennifer McNeilly, Gretchen Adams
Chemistry

Chemistry Merit ClassThis project is focusing on recruiting and retaining students in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and is broadening the STEM student base to include the large proportion of students who have not declared their major. The target population consists of students who have high potential but are at risk, and who are from among traditionally under-represented students, as well as rural students.

This Merit-Based Immersion for Students and Teachers (MIST) project is building on and expanding the Merit-style program of facilitated group learning. Merit-style teaching consists of using a highly trained facilitator-instructor to stimulate student-student interactions by providing challenging problem sets or other activities for the students. The facilitator provides feedback as the students work together in small groups, and also encourages everyone in the group to interact and discuss each student's strategies.

Noyce: Preparing Excellence and Diversity in Secondary Mathematics Teachers for Illinois' High Needs Schools

National Science Foundation Award # 0934901
Rochelle Gutierrez, Joseph Miles
Curriculum and instruction, Mathematics

The Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) are awarding Noyce Scholarships to 39 students, including 24 undergraduate mathematics majors and 15 postbaccalaureate students, enrolled in programs leading to secondary teaching certification in mathematics. School districts served by the project include the small urban districts of Champaign, Urbana, Decatur, and Danville, as well as rural districts in Tolono, Rantoul, and Mahomet. The Noyce Illinois program combines a rigorous mathematics and education curriculum with extensive interaction with leading faculty in the area of equity and effective mathematics teaching of marginalized students. It offers early field experiences and student-teaching placements in high needs school districts, supported by targeted opportunities to learn and apply the latest theories and cutting-edge practices for supporting marginalized students to learn mathematics in the 21st Century. Summer internships in K-12 STEM education programs are offered as a recruitment strategy for prospective Noyce Scholars. A monthly Noyce seminar focuses on problems from the field, reflection on coursework, the skills needed for teaching in high needs schools, and video examples of classroom teaching. Noyce Scholars have access to the particularly rich and diverse array of summer enrichment programs operated by the University of Illinois across the Colleges of Engineering, Agricultural and Economic Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as UI Extension. Noyce Illinois incorporates formalized mechanisms to support ongoing interactions among Noyce graduates and campus groups as well as professional development sessions and online mentoring geared to support graduates in their first year of teaching.

Open Your Eyes to the Skies: An Innovative and Interdisciplinary Astronomy/Astrochemistry Teaching Laboratory

National Science Foundation Award # 0737002
Leslie Looney, Nick Glumac, Benjamin McCall
Astronomy

View of sky through telescopeThis project is creating a multi-use teaching laboratory in the historic University of Illinois Observatory building (a National Historic Landmark) that allows students to use the 12-inch Brashear refracting telescope (completed in 1896) and a suite of smaller telescopes together with spectrographs, laboratory experiments, and computer-based activities, such as data analysis. In addition, the project is developing an ensemble of undergraduate courses that utilize the Observatory in a new way to better promote science education with a hands-on, active learning approach. Two of these courses target non-astronomy majors who take the introductory astronomy courses to satisfy their quantitative reasoning university requirement. A third course targets astronomy majors, who otherwise get very little exposure to real observing and experimentation. The fourth course is the nation's first laboratory course in the emerging interdisciplinary field of astrochemistry.

PFC: Center for the Physics of Living Cells

National Science Foundation Award # 0822613
Taekjip Ha, Klaus Schulten
Physics

Image of how a cell's biomolecular motor moves. (Illustration by PrecisionGraphics.com)In the Center for the Physics of Living Cells (CPLC) experimentalists, computational physicists, and theorists will jointly attack the extreme technical challenges posed by quantifying processes in living cells with the sensitivity needed to explore how life organizes itself, weaving molecular systems into the fabric of living matter. Specifically, the Center will: (1) push in vitro single molecule techniques to a 10- to 100-fold increase in sensitivity, spatio-temporal resolution, and throughput for concurrent detection of multiple observables; (2) use synthetic nanostructures to manipulate single molecules, enabling measurements of both forces and molecular conformation with sub-microsecond resolution; (3) observe individual events within single cells, enabling time- and space-resolved studies of gene expression and other key cellular processes; and (4) extend computation to biologically relevant timescales, and theory to greater biological realism, enabling the detailed interpretation of the dynamics of biological systems from the molecular to the cellular level. The interaction between theory, computation, in vitro and in vivo experiments will be at the core of the Center's mission. A concrete example combining these four approaches will be to build a truly quantitative and dynamic physical picture of transcription and translation machinery used by the cell to copy DNA into RNA and then into proteins.

The Center will provide exciting educational opportunities on and off campus. For Ph.D. students, the Center will build a community around special seminars, symposia, tailored courses, and joint mentoring and help generate a new generation of scientists who are fluent in both physics and biology. This new science will be brought to the undergraduate level in the form of courses, online computing and visualization environments, and a single-molecule laboratory course where they can acquire hands-on experience. The Center will recruit minority students into the REU programs and summer workshops through partnership with primarily minority institutions and participation in two annual scientific meetings for under-represented minorities. At the high school level, the Center will expand an existing programs in which Ph.D. students can act as mentors for teachers on and off campus, introducing visualization tools and modern molecular biology concepts into the classroom. To address young students directly, the Center will establish a pilot program at a girls' middle school. This program will provide contact with students as they begin their formal science education, exposing them to modern biophysical concepts and tools. To the scientific community, the Center will provide visualization and simulation tools to enable the study of macromolecular assemblies and cells. Likewise, the state-of-the-art instrumentation developed by the Center will lead to mainstream applications in biological sciences and is expected to have major commercial impact.

REU Site: Applying the Tools of Physics to Contemporary Problems in Science Engineering

National Science Foundation Award # 0647885
Gary Gladding, Toni Pitts
Physics

This award supports an REU site at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The ten-week program involves Physics research projects in condensed matter physics, materials physics, biological physics, nuclear and high-energy physics, astrophysics, atomic physics, computational physics, and complex systems. The program introduces undergraduate students to the broad range of problems in science and engineering that can be addressed using the tools of physics. The REU projects are original research exercises intimately related to ongoing faculty research at the cutting edge of physics. Students write code that is subsequently used in real experiments; they design and test components for real instruments; and they analyze real data. Projects are challenging but “doable” and are designed to achieve measurable accomplishments in the 10-week time frame. A wide range of research activities are supported so that participants receive an engaging introduction to the breadth of forefront research opportunities in the major subdisciplines of physics. In addition to research skills, undergraduates receive valuable training in technical communications skills, teamwork skills, and research ethics, and information and discussion on career choices. The program will also work to ensure student progress and success by assigning a graduate student or postdoc in the individual research groups as a personal “mentor” in addition to the faculty adviser, scheduling frequent and regular student-faculty interactions and promoting collegial relationships among the REU students and the larger Physics community at Illinois. Students will present three oral reports during the program: a 5-minute introductory talk during the first week; an informal 10-15-minute “progress” report during the sixth week, and a formal APS-style presentation in the final week. Talented undergraduate students from academic institutions having limited research programs in physics will be especially recruited and encouraged to apply, as will students who are members of historically under-represented minority groups.

REU Site: Interdisciplinary Investigations at New Philadelphia

National Science Foundation Award # 0752834
Christopher Fennell
Anthropology

This REU Site award is to the University of Illinois for interdisciplinary scientific archaeological investigations of the first town planned and legally registered by an African-American in the United States. The town was established on the Midwestern frontier in the 19th century and grew as an integrated rural community until a regional railroad bypassed it in 1869. The REU Site's goal is to incorporate undergraduate students in the research design, data collection, and analysis of archaeological materials. The project will have alliances with the Illinois State Museum, DePaul University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois-Springfield, and the New Philadelphia Association, a local non-profit group.

REU Site: Multidisciplinary Research in Aerospace Science and Engineering

National Science Foundation Award # 0648996
Philippe H. Geubelle
Aerospace Engineering

This award for an REU Site at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign supports 10 undergraduate students each year for three years in a 10-week summer program that focuses on multidisciplinary research in aerospace science and engineering (ASE). The objectives of the REU Site are: 1) to provide intensive, educational, and stimulating research opportunities for undergraduates and 2) to better prepare students with research and communication skills necessary for graduate work and their future careers. The main component of the REU will be hands-on research that is multidisciplinary and in the forefront of the aerospace field. Other educational activities (seminars, informal meetings, final student presentations and papers) will enhance and support the student research. These activities will be designed to teach research and communication skill sets and to better inform students as they make choices concerning graduate school and entering the workforce. Undergraduate students with backgrounds in engineering, computer science, and physics will be recruited for this program. In order to reach underserved and underrepresented populations, recruitment efforts will be targeted to four-year colleges in the Midwest, universities with pre-engineering programs, and minority-serving institutions.

REU Site: Summer Undergraduate Research Internship Program at the Information Trust Institute

National Science Foundation Award # 0851957
Michael Loui; Masooda Bashir
Information Trust Institute

The security and economic well-being of our society rests upon the trustworthiness of a vast complex of networked information systems that provide communications, computing, and control to manage our nation’s critical infrastructure systems (power, transportation, aerospace, telecommunications, health care, emergency response, banking, finance, and e-commerce). These critical infrastructure systems face enormous threats to their operation not only from malicious attacks, but also from their very nature as extremely complex, interconnected, and interdependent systems. The proposed summer REU site at the Information Trust Institute (ITI), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advances knowledge about techniques for analyzing and improving the security, reliability, and safety of networked information systems.

This site has extensive computing resources and includes a team of senior investigators who have previous experience in collaborating with undergraduates in research projects. This effort is based upon projects in two prior highly successful summer undergraduate research internship programs that have resulted in co-authored publications. The topics of research are timely and address the important computing research problem of protecting networked information systems.

A diverse group of undergraduates is learning how to conduct research and is becoming prepared to pursue graduate studies. The research teams include women and underrepresented minorities. Domestic students in this program are interacting with otherwise supported international students through their research projects and through ethics sessions. Graduate student mentors are learning mentoring skills. The educational effectiveness of the summer program, the ethics sessions, and the mentoring experiences are being assessed. The results of the assessments will be presented at conferences on computer science education and on engineering education.

Smart Structures Technology Summer School

National Science Foundation Award # 0812104
Billie Spencer
Civil and Environmental Engineering

Smart Structures students examine suspension bridge.This award supports a series of three 3-week international summer schools in the design and construction of smart structures. The schools will provide students with multidisciplinary training in key areas related to smart structures: structural dynamics, control systems, circuit technology, wireless technology, and informatics. In addition, they will familiarize students with forefront research related to smart structures technology in participating countries. The summer schools will be held in Korea in 2008, the US in 2009, and Japan in 2010 and will involve approximately ten graduate students in civil and mechanical engineering from each of the participating countries. The program of each school includes coursework, labs, and site visits.

The program is a collaboration among PI Billie Spencer in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; C.B. Yun, professor and director of the Smart Infra-Structure Technology Center (SISTeC) of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Korea; Yozo Fujino, head of the Bridge Engineering Laboratory at University of Tokyo in Japan; and Guo-Qiang Li, professor of structural engineering at Tongji University in China. It is expected that the schools will create an environment in which highly motivated students, faculty, and professionals will be able to establish lasting international collaborative arrangements. The NSF award, jointly funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation in the Directorate for Engineering, supports the U.S. side of the collaboration.

Summer Research Training in Infectious Diseases

National Institutes of Health Award # 5T35RR020292-05
Louis Hoyer
Veterinary Medicine

The long-term goal of the program is to identify and facilitate the career progression of veterinary students who have the ability and motivation to become independent research scientists in infectious diseases. The objectives of this program are: 1) to provide support for a summer training program for future veterinarians that will expose them to the area of hypothesis-driven biomedical research in infectious diseases; 2) to expand the training opportunities for veterinary students in biomedical research in order to introduce them to scientific career opportunities in research areas including, but not limited to, microbiology, immunology, parasitology, epidemiology, and pathology; and 3) to expose veterinary students to the principles underlying the responsible conduct of research. The program is being advertised internally and announced to other veterinary colleges. Applicants will be selected on the basis of an examination of the applicant's academic record, previous experience, and evaluation of the letters of application and recommendation. Ten students are selected, two of them from colleges outside Illinois. The trainees’ research ranges from basic studies on the biology of pathogens and the mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions, to the development of diagnostic methods and prevention measures. The students are expected to attend a first week introductory course on topics, such as basic experimental design, collection and organization of data, basic data analysis, proposal writing, bioethics, biosafety, and animal and human use in research. Trainees are being matched with a faculty member with compatible research interests. Each student will be expected to complete the background readings, formulate a testable hypothesis, design the experiments, prepare a brief proposal, conduct the study, and analyze and report the results. A one-day research meeting will be convened at the conclusion of the ten-week program. Each student will be required to give a poster presentation and write a final report of his/her work.

Training Program at the Chemistry-Biology Interface

National Institutes of Health Award #: 5T32GM070421-05
Wilfred van der Donk
School of Chemical Sciences, School of Molecular and Cellular Biology

The School of Chemical Sciences (SCS) at the University of Illinois is implementing a training program at the Chemistry-Biology interface to enroll 10 predoctoral students per year (five 2nd-yr and five 3rd-yr students). The program is, through shared experiences in the classroom and in the laboratory, producing a cadre of chemists, chemical and biomolecular engineers, and biologists who share a common language. Program graduates are being prepared to assume leadership positions in industry and academe and will be capable of functioning in multidisciplinary teams poised to make major advances in biology and medicine. Twenty-five faculty from two departments in the SCS and four in the School of Molecular & Cellular Biology—Chemistry, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Cell & Structural Biology, and Molecular & Integrative Physiology—who work at the chemistry-biology interface, serve as faculty mentors. Talented students are admitted to the host departments' doctoral programs form the pool of candidates for the program. They receive the PhD from their department after completing both the requirements for that department's program and the course sequence for the CBI. Program completion takes between four and five years. Prospective students are being recruited from among universities nationwide. Underrepresented minority students are recruited through several Illinois campus-based programs (MERGE, HURF, SROP), through attendance at SACNAS and ACBRMS meetings, through interaction with MARC program directors, and through targeted partnerships with institutions having large minority enrollments. A biological-chemistry undergraduate concentration also provides a pipeline into CBI training programs nationwide. Roger Adams Lab, the Chemistry and Life Sciences Laboratory, Noyes Lab, and the soon-to-be-completed Institute for Genomic Biology house faculty laboratories, seminar rooms, student and fabrication facilities. The Beckman Institute and the Biotechnology Center house additional facilities.

Underrepresented Undergraduates in STEM at Large Research Universities: From Matriculation to Degree Completion

National Science Foundation Award # 0856309
William Trent
Educational Policy Studies

This is a three-year study that is examining the matriculation, persistence, and degree attainment of full-time, first-time enrolled women, minorities, and low-income undergraduate students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields at a consortium of 11 large research universities. This project is using statistical and qualitative research methods to identify key individual and institutional factors that affect underrepresented students' matriculation, persistence, and degree completion in the STEM fields. It is evaluating the impact of course offerings, policies and practices, and program interventions designed to increase educational outcomes. This study is contributing to understanding by using large samples of underrepresented students and placing them into meaningful categories (by racial/ethnic sub-group, academic preparation, and STEM major), as well as the intersection with critical demographic characteristics, such as socioeconomic status.

The findings from the study are intended to increase understanding about how postsecondary institutions can use mechanisms and program interventions to improve the persistence and degree attainment of underrepresented students in the STEM fields. The study will benefit the academic community by creating a graduate-level course to be offered to students enrolled at any CIC institution to discuss the empirical, methodological, policy, and program issues that impact the representation of women and minorities in the STEM fields, with specific attention to students attending large, research universities.

University of Illinois Mathematics GAANN Fellowship Project

US Department of Education Award # P200A090062
Karen Mortensen, Randy McCarthy
Mathematics

Workshop: Illinois Summer Neuroscience Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL; May 2010, 2011 and 2012

National Science Foundation Award # 0925332
Gene Robinson
Institute for Genomic Biology

This project will support the Illinois Summer Neuroscience Institute (ISNI) for three years. The Institute provides students with an introduction to neuroscience research, to graduate school, to careers in neuroscience, and to the neuroscience community. The ISNI is a one-week intensive introduction to neuroscience, targeting mainly students from underrepresented groups in science, in their first two years of undergraduate study. The ISNI is held at the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) and is organized and led by the Illinois Neuroscience Program. Students learn about state-of-the-art questions and techniques from Illinois faculty who are experts in a broad range of areas within neuroscience. After hearing about research from the faculty, the students conduct a laboratory exercise that allows them to experience the challenge, excitement, and the inevitable frustrations of research. The exercises will take advantage of the expertise in insect neuroethology and Drosophila genetics at Illinois. The purpose of the Institute is to attract students to neuroscience who might not otherwise have the opportunity or exposure to the discipline and to the neuroscience community. The ultimate goal is to expand the pool of applicants, especially from underrepresented groups, to Illinois and to other neuroscience programs in the US.


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