In the past year, the College’s first Program of Excellence, the Scholar-Educator Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Neuroscience and Behavior (POENB) made much progress. The first priority of POENB was to develop a web site, www.lilt.ilstu.edu/POENB, which was uploaded at the end of the summer in order to better recruit candidates for the Behavior Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellowship. In all, 58 candidates submitted materials to the program’s Selection Committee and four are now being considered for the two fellowships. Also, four POENB Seminars were sponsored in 2006 by the BEES (Behavior, Evolution, Ecology, and Systematics) Brownbag and the Neuroscience Seminar Series. Paul Garris, POENB Director, said, “The highlight of the POENB Seminar Program during the first year will be the visit by Dr. Gregory F. Ball, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.” Dr. Ball will present two seminars at Illinois State on March 1 and 2.
The Biomathematics Program of Excellence also made marked progress over the past year. Currently, Diane Byers, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, and Olcay Akman, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, are finalizing an MS sequence proposal. There is no other Biomathematics MS program in Illinois, and the few existing programs in the nation typically do not exhibit the strong, balanced emphasis on course work in both disciplines this Biomathematics program will offer. This program will be available for MS thesis students in either Biological Sciences or Mathematics, and students can choose to focus on Biological Statistics and Modeling or Computation and Bioinformatics. This sequence will be available to students in Fall 2007.
During the past year, the Mind Project Program of Excellence has had twelve students from two continents developing a mobile robot designed for its pedagogical value in the classroom. This project has produced 25 cutting-edge, interactive, online curriculum modules that include online experiments, computer simulations, and virtual research labs designed around the work of world class scientists. The project has also submitted a National Endowment for the Humanities grant proposal to develop curriculum that will explore the ways in which new developments in cognitive science impact issues of concern to the humanities.
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The Nanotechnology Education and Research POE also made significant progress toward its goals. In March 2005, the program began working with the Advanced Materials Group at Caterpillar. Caterpillar has since become a valued grant and program partner. The company has agreed to fund a proposal on superlattice thermoelectrics submitted by Dr. Shang-Fen Ren, Professor of Physics, and Dr. David Marx, Assistant Professor of Physics. Both Ren and Marx have also developed collaborative efforts for nanoscience projects with Bradley University, UC-Berkeley, MIT, University of Dayton, and Argonne National Lab. Thermoelectrics are useful because they can generate electricity from a heat source, such as an automobile muffler or radiator. Industry could use these materials to generate electricity from numerous waste heat sources, recovering energy that would otherwise be lost. Thermoelectrics can also be used to transport heat from one place to another by passing a current through them. Dr. Frank Shaw, Professor of Chemistry, is also pursuing projects with metal nanoparticles to explore diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Also Karen Lind, Director of CeMaST, and Anu Gokhale, Professor of Technology, are developing course modules for science and technology general education courses. The first effort is toward an undergraduate certificate program, in which students majoring in chemistry, biology, physics, or any other related discipline would take an additional nine hours of multidisciplinary training in nanoscience and technology. The program also plans to host a nanoscience symposium at some point in the future, bringing in well-known researchers in the field, government program managers, and industrial researchers.
This year, the College will add a new Program of Excellence to the four existing programs. The winning program of this highly competitive award will receive up to $25,000 in funding. The guidelines for the Program of Excellence specify that the program should be clearly interdisciplinary, drawing substantially on the disciplinary expertise of two or more academic departments. Unique and innovative disciplinary collaborations are 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 and demonstrate the potential for the program to secure external funding. 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.