November 17, 2010

NEW GRANT AWARDS:

Kirk Barrett, Passaic River Institute, CSAM, received $30,943 for the first year of a four year grant from the National Science Foundation for  “MSU’s Research Experience for Undergraduates”.  This grant will provide 10 students with an eight week summer educational experience through participation in transdisciplinary, hands-on field research in environmental sciences.  Much of the research will take place at MSU’s field campus at the New Jersey School of Conservation. Seven faculty members will serve as mentors on the project:  Dibyendu Sarkar, Paul Bologna, Joshua Galster, Duke Ophori, Gregory Pope, Huan Feng and MeiYin Wu.

Evan Fuller, Mathematical Sciences, CSAM, received $15,700 for the first year of a three year National Science Foundation grant held by Rutgers.  The project, entitled “Proving Styles in University Mathematics,” will investigate the prevalence and correlation with success of different proving strategies used by undergraduate math majors.  One hundred math majors will be interviewed as they complete tasks.  Their proving strategies will be examined to determine how their use of different strategies correlates with success on interview tasks and how their preferred strategy correlates with intelligence or academic success as measured by SAT scores and grades.

David Galef, English, CHSS, has been awarded a year-end fellowship stay at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Lisa Lieberman, Health and Nutrition Science, CEHS, received $132,940 in funding from Inwood House in New York, for the first year of a five year sub-award to MSU of  $670,344.  Funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Adolescent Family Life Program will evaluate the efficacy of Inwood House’s continuum of care for pregnant teens when enhanced by specific additional services offered to pregnant teens and their significant others.  A graduate student assistant will assist with development of surveys, protocols and approval documents. 

Bryan Murdock, Director for Service Learning in the Research Academy of University Learning, and Bill Thomas, Director of the School of Conservation, received a one year grant for $260,000 from the New Jersey Commission on National and Community Service for an AmeriCorps project.   This is a collaboration among MSU’s New Jersey School of Conservation, the Service Learning and Community Engagement Program and the Center for Student Involvement.  It will build and develop a multi-site, campus-based national service program to engage University resources in three areas: environmental action and education, community economic development, and education.

Jing Peng, Computer Science, CSAM, received a grant from Syracuse University funded by the US Department of Air Force in the amount of $29,040 for a research project titled “Closed-Loop Learning Integrated Robust Information Fusion”.  The goal of this project is to prove a strong result for the proposed algorithm by casting it within the adversarial multi-armed bandit framework and further validating the analysis using wide area image data for persistent target tracking.

Jennifer Brown Urban, Family and Child Studies, CEHS, received supplemental funding of $60,478 to support an undergraduate student for three years from Cornell University’s National Science Foundation grant.  This ongoing grant, entitled “Systems Evaluation Protocol of Assessing and Improving STEM,” explores how effective evaluation systems are developed both generally and for STEM education programs specifically.

Mei Yin Wu, Biology and Molecular Biology, CSAM, received  $14,138 for the first year of a three year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled “Collaborative Research:  Greenhouse Gas Balance of Urban Temperate Wetlands”.  Because it is critical to assess the danger global climate change poses to wetlands, this   project, a collaborative effort with Rutgers University, will derive greenhouse gas balances for two distinct urban temperate wetland ecosystems. Two undergraduate students will be trained in climate change science in anticipation of them choosing a science career path.

Congratulations to these colleagues.