EMBARGOED until 5 a.m. on Tuesday, April 22
Summary: Calvin College has received a $1.1 million grant and will use the funds to expand opportunities in the sciences for its own students and faculty as well as local high school students.
Calvin College is launching a new science institute funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
Calvin's Integrated Science Research Institute (ISRI) is being created in recognition of the current trend in the sciences to work across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
"You can't be just a biologist to solve the big problems," said Calvin biology professor David DeHeer, the chair of the committee behind the ISRI. "You can't be just a chemist or a mathematician. What is required is to put together a team with various areas of expertise to solve a problem."
The ISRI will allow Calvin to foster collaboration in the sciences through research, faculty development, curriculum and outreach, including:
*funding 36 Calvin students and faculty mentors in 15-month research projects
*developing Calvin faculty research clusters drawn from a variety of disciplines
*creating a new integrated science minor
*establishing an apprentice program for local high school students to research with Calvin faculty and students
The director of the ISRI, Randall Pruim is excited about the challenges presented by new institute.
"The main challenge," he said, "is to bring together all of the people who have ideas and find time to allow them to realize their ideas. We're looking for ways that we can make changes to the curriculum at Calvin that will help our students more easily cross over disciplinary boundaries."
Another outcome of the grant will be the building of a visualization and modeling laboratory, whose focus will be computational science. The laboratory will allow faculty teams drawn from all of the scientific disciplines and students to model problems, using computer simulations and visualizations.
"We're hoping to build 3-D visualizations that you can then walk around in," said Calvin professor of computer science Joel Adams. "Imagine you put on glasses, and, suddenly, you're in a 3-D virtual world with a giant model of DNA or some other complex molecule hanging in the air in front of you. You can walk around the molecule and interact with it by touching it. That's the sort of thing we hope to be able to do in this new lab."
The $1.1 million grant to Calvin is part of $60 million the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is giving to 48 undergraduate institutions around the nation to develop innovative ways to teach science. Locally Hope and Kalamazoo colleges also received major grants as part of the 48 colleges and universities honored with 2008 awards.
Founded in 1953 by Howard R. Hughes, the aviator and industrialist, HHMI is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and has an endowment of $16.3 billion. The HHMI grants program funds initiatives with the power to transform undergraduate and graduate education by engaging students in discovery research.
Contact David De Heer at 616-526-6083
Also see http://www.hhmi.org/
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Received on Mon Apr 21 22:15:48 2008
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