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Members of the
Neuroscience POE Team
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The “The Scholar-Educator Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Neuroscience and Behavior” has been designated the College’s first Program of Excellence and will receive full funding through 2007. This program weds a rigorous academic curriculum with a cutting-edge research agenda. It substantially enhances the educational experience of a large number of ISU students while promising to add substantively to knowledge in several disciplines. The program leverages the $90,000 of Program of Excellence funding into $172,000—almost double that provided. It draws on the expertise of a dozen faculty representing 4 departments in the college and one external to the college: from Biological Sciences, Rachel Bowden, Paul Garris, Scott Sakaluk, Charles Thompson, and Laura Vogel; from the Central Illinois Neuroscience Foundation, Joe Casto; from Chemistry, John Baur; from Philosophy, David Anderson; and from Psychology, Valeri Farmer-Dougan and Byron Heidenreich. Employing a scholar-educator model, this program establishes two scholar-educator post-doctoral fellowships in neuroscience and behavior. These fellows will teach courses, engage in research, mentor students, and be mentored by faculty.
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Members of the Biomathematics
POE Team
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The “Biomathematics: MS Sequence and Cross-Disciplinary Research at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics” is a new master’s sequence that incorporates cross-disciplinary research as integral to the curriculum. Through this Master’s sequence, students will choose a series of courses concentrated in one of three critical areas of Biomathematics (theoretical and applied statistics, deterministic and stochastic modeling, or computation and bioinformatics) and conduct thesis research within the cross-disciplinary field of Biomathematics. The program draws on the expertise of 17 faculty: from Biological Sciences, Diane Byers, Kevin Edwards, Paul Garris, Craig Gatto, Steven Juliano, Sabine Loew, Scott Sakaluk, and Charles Thompson; from Mathematics, Fusun Akman, Olcay Akman, Fuxia Cheng, Roger Eggleton, Saad El-Zanati, Heather Gavlas, Dong-Yun Kim, and Shailesh Tipnis. There is no other Biomathematics MA program in Illinois, and the few existing programs in the nation typically do not exhibit the strong and balanced emphasis on course work in both disciplines the Biomathematics program will offer.
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The Mind Project's Virtual Cyd
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“The Mind Project Learning and Research Center” builds on the existing strengths of ISU’s Mind Project and is “positioned to become not only the Internet destination for state-of-the-art research and curriculum materials, but a digital public square where innovation abounds.” The project will, for example, facilitate student-faculty collaborations, sponsor national and international teleconferences, offer entire sequences of distance education courses, publish electronic books and articles, and debate research and public policy issues. It draws on faculty from 9 CAS departments and from CeMaST, the College of Education, and CAS-IT, as well as faculty from off campus: from Anthropology, Jim Stanlaw; from Biological Sciences, Paul Garris; from CAS-IT, Neal Lawson, Sarah Walcznski, and Owen Williams; from CeMaST, Karen Lind; from Chemistry, William Hunter; from English, K. Aaron Smith; from Foreign Languages, Lorie Heggie; from Mathematics, Jeff Barrett and Shailesh Tipnis; from the Milner Library, Morag Boyd and Rick Satchwell; from Philosophy, David Anderson, Chris Horvath, Kenton Machina, and Todd Stewart; from Physics, Dan Holland and Hiroshi Matsuoka; from Psychology, Cooper Cutting, Valeri Farmer-Dougan, Byron Heidenriech, J. Scott Jordan, Dawn McBride and Jeff Wagman; from the College of Education, Barbara Meyer; as well as teams from the Central Illinois Neuroscience Foundation (CINF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the MIT Press.
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Members of the Nanotechnology POE Team
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“Nanotechnology Education and Research” is an innovative integration of an academic program, a research agenda, technology transfer to industry, public outreach, and national and international collaboration among researchers. In addition to research and public education on nanotechnology, the project will work to develop an interdisciplinary graduate program and partnerships with industry leaders such as those at Caterpillar. It is headed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty from 4 CAS departments, as well as from CeMaST and CAS-IT: from Biological Sciences, Paul Garris and Dave Williams; from CeMaST, Karen Lind and Bob Turner; from Chemistry, John Baur, Greg Ferrence, Craig McLauchlan, and Lisa Szczepura; from the College of Applied Science & Technology, Anu Gokhale; from Mathematics, Fuxia Cheng; from Physics, Ross Bogue, David Marx, Sheng-Fen Ren, Epa Rosa, and Carl Wenning; as well as national and international collaborations with Argonne National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, and universities such as MIT and UC-Berkeley.
The guidelines for the Program of Excellence specify that the program should be clearly interdisciplinary, drawing substantively on the disciplinary expertise of two or more academic departments. Unique and innovative disciplinary collaborations were highly encouraged, even those across collegial borders. The program itself should be clearly distinctive, unlike any other program in the state of Illinois. As such, the program should attract considerable national attention. The proposed program should draw on existing personnel and resources as much as possible. The program may be an undergraduate or graduate certificate program, a new minor, a new sequence in an existing major, or a program devoted exclusively to primary research.