Funded Projects

NSF S-STEM entitled: Partnership for Recruiting and Retaining High Need, High Potential Students to Food, Environmental, Engineering, and Life Sciences (FEELS)

FEELS represents a partnership between Purdue's College of Agriculture and the business community to recruit, retain, and equip 15-20 high-need/high-potential students through exceptional mentoring, learning and research experiences. FEELS Fellows will receive an intentional package of leveraged, successful programs strongly complemented by new FEELS-initiated academic and mentoring components. FEELS seeks to: increase diversity within Purdue's College of Agriculture, improve graduation and retention rates while enhancing student achievement, prepare students to become industry and academic leaders in the STEM professions, and increase awareness of STEM opportunities in high-need communities while enhancing our engagement with, and connection to, such regions. For more information contact Dr. Rabi Mohtar (mohtar@purdue.edu).

NSF Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP)

The Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Indiana project is a collaboration among five universities in the state. The over-arching goal is to increase the learning and success of the minorities in the STEM fields. LSAMP Indiana will implement programs that: provide early research and enrichment experiences, sustain teaching and mentoring opportunities on gatekeeper, as well as upper-level courses, provide personalized interactions with graduate students and faculty mentors beginning in the students’ first year, and provide professional and personal development opportunities. These early experiences with research and teaching are designed to encourage students to forge and sustain an academic and social identification within their STEM discipline and serve as a solid foundation for student achievement. For more information contact Dr. Beverly Davenport Sypher (bdsypher@purdue.edu).

Howard Hughes Medical Institute entitled: Electronic Field Trips in Comparative Biology

The Purdue University School of Veterinary Medicine, Discovery Learning Research Center, Purdue Agriculture, ITAP, and faculty from the College of Education are collaborating with the Indiana higher Education Telecommunications System, and Indiana Public Broadcasting Services, to bring the scientific research community to middle school classrooms through the development of a series of Electronic Field Trips. These field trips will help middle school students: relate to science through intrinsically exciting and age-appropriate presentations of comparative biology issues, better understand the role and relevance of science in society and increase their potential to function as scientifically literate citizens, and learn about career opportunities in science and the academic preparation pathways to becoming a scientist. For more information contact Dr. J. Paul Robinson (jpr@flowcyto.purdue.edu).

NSF entitled: CPATH EAE: Extending a Bottom-Up Education Model to Support Concurrency from the First Year

Advances in the processing industry have caused fundamental changes in the future of hardware design and will have a dramatic impact in software development and algorithms, pushing towards the pervasive use of parallelism – necessitating changes in strategies for undergraduate education in computer science and computer engineering. The CPATH project will redesign the ECE undergraduate curriculum to create an articulated curriculum that supports student acquisition of knowledge, understanding, and effective use of concurrency, as utilized in today’s industry. For more information contact Dr. Vijay Pai (vpai@purdue.edu).

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation entitled: Tecumseh Project: Purdue Program for Native Americans - A Proposal for a Partnership between Purdue University and the Sloan Foundation

The Tecumseh project seeks to enhance the number of Native American Purdue graduates through a deliberate program that includes development of long term relationships with potential graduate students and their communities and educational systems. Once on campus, significant retention efforts will include financial support and a culturally relevant and supportive learning community. This project will enhance the diversity of the nation's scientific workforce, while developing Native American professionals with the skills and knowledge to tackle scientific and environmental problems faced by native communities. For more information contact Dr. Dwight Lewis (delewis@purdue.edu).

NSF Alliance for Graduate Education & Professoriate (AGEP) entitled: Midwest Crossroads AGEP

The Midwest Crossroads of AGEP,

an alliance between Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana University and Northwestern University, aims to triple the number of underrepresented minorities receiving doctoral degrees in STEM fields. This goal will be achieved through a tripartate program that includes: recruiting, through linkages and partnerships with Indiana LSAMP, regional undergraduate institutions, and predominantly minority serving institutions nationwide, off-campus visits by AGEP faculty, staff, and students, and undergraduate summer research programs; retention, through partnerships with minority student organizations to provide instant peer networks for incoming students, faculty mentors, and summer transition experiences; and enrichment, through a variety of educational, cultural, community-building, and professional development experiences. For more information contact Dr. Beverly Davenport Sypher (bdsypher@purdue.edu).

NSF CCLI entitled: Collaborative Research: Institutionalizing a Reform Curriculum in Large Universities

In collaboration with North Carolina State and Georgia Technical Institute, Purdue University will facilitate the implementation of the Matter & Interactions curriculum and will widen the base of dissemination by the following: creating supporting infrastructure and activities, studying and documenting the changes and adaptations necessary to make the curriculum work well at different institutions, assessing the impact of this curriculum on both students and faculty, and working on further improvements to the instructional materials used by students. For more information contact Dr. Mark Haugan (haugan@purdue.edu).

NSF ESI entitled: NCLT: Center for Learning & Teaching in Nanoscale Science and Engineering

The mission of NCLT is to develop the next generation of leaders in NSEE teaching and learning, with an emphasis on NSEE capacity building, providing a strong impact on national STEM education. The Center's core operational strategy is an Integrated Program comprised of five component areas: learning research; nano concept, course, and learning technology development; professional development; resource dissemination, networking and community building; and Evaluation and Assessment. For more information contact Dr. Nicholas Giordano (giordano@purdue.edu).

NSF Undergraduate Research Center (URC) entitled Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE)

The Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE) is a multi-institutional collaborative effort designed to address major barriers to providing research experiences to younger undergraduate science students. CASPiE takes advantage of complementary strengths and needs of its partner institutions to develop a program that will: 1) provide first and second year students with access to research experiences as part of the mainstream curriculum; 2) create a collaborative, “research group” environment for students in the laboratory; 3) provide access to advanced instrumentation through development of a remote instrumentation network; 4) help faculty develop undergraduate research projects that enhance their own research capacity; and 5) create a research experience that is engaging for women and ethnic minorities and appropriate for use at various types of institutions, including those with diverse populations. For more information contact Dr. Gabriela Weaver (gweaver@purdue.edu).

NSF (GK-12) entitled The Indiana Interdisciplinary GK-12: Bringing Authentic Problem Solving in STEM to Rural Middle Schools

The Indiana Interdisciplinary GK-12 combines the interdisciplinary research focus of Purdue University with the rural and small town learning context of three Indiana school corporations. The project aims to improve middle school science education while dramatically enhancing STEM graduate students’ experience and understanding of learning and teaching. This project offers a unique one-year fellowship for doctoral students in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to serve as "visiting scientists" in a program designed to instill the excitement of learning science into middle school classrooms. STEM fellows gain an insight into teaching and learning, as well as enhanced understanding and ability to communicate their own science. For more information contact Ms. Amy Childress (childres@purdue.edu) or Dr. Jonathan Harbor (jharbor@purdue.edu).

Indiana Commission for Higher Education entitled Standards Based Integrated Science Instruction for the Middle Grades (SISI)

This program provides intensive professional development and long term support to assist teachers at IPS and other education agencies to use the Indiana Curriculum Framework to align classroom curricula with Indiana’s Academic Standards in order to better utilize authentic, inquiry-based instruction, to prepare for the ISTEP+ assessment, and to increase their knowledge of science and mathematics content and pedagogy. Professional development goals will be presented and accomplished in an integrated manner through an instructional unit, Critters, Cages, and Climate, that integrates life science, physical science, mathematics, technology, engineering, art design, and language arts. Teachers gain the skills needed to enhance student learning in their classrooms through the application of science to problems in the real world. For more information contact Dr. Gerald Krockover (hawk1@purdue.edu).

NSF (Geo Ed Track II) entitled Mentoring Native American Students for Success in Graduate Programs in the Geosciences

Native Americans are the minority of the minorities in higher education, including the geosciences, despite the fact that most Native cultures have a deep cultural bond with Earth. This GEMscholars program is seeking to increase the number of Native American students successfully pursuing graduate Geoscience degrees. To help achieve this goal, this project recruits Ojibwe students in partnership with Bemidji State University and the American Indian Resource Center. The project will adapt Native American student education models that have been proposed but not tested through the key themes of mentoring, culturally relevant valuations of geosciences and necessary career paths, and connections to community and family. For more information contact Dr. Suzanne Zurn-Birkhimer (zurnbirk@purdue.edu).

Taking Nanoscience to the Public

Recent movies, books, and advertising campaigns have brought the term nanoscience to the public. However, few people understand the depth, breadth, potential, and risks associated with this new technology. The Discovery Learning Research Center, in partneriship with Purdue's College of Agriculture, spearheaded the development of a museum display focused on nanoscience. This 400 square foot display, highlighting research efforts at Purdue University, visited the Indiana State Museum and the Indiana Fair Grounds. The exhibit will travel to various other museums in Indiana, the Midwest, and elsewhere. For more information contact the Discovery Learning Research Center (learningcenter@purdue.edu).