Organized by a sub-committee of the Natural Science Division.
Last updated : Monday, October 04, 2004 at 07:31:00 EST
At Earlham College, and more broadly across the undergraduate landscape, student-faculty research is an essential part of the science curriculum. In addition to training in technical skills, challenging, open ended research projects provide opportunities for students to develop crucial independent thinking and learning skills and to build confidence in their ability to perform scientific research. Ongoing research on campus also fosters an exciting, engaging environment for both students and faculty and prepares students for future endeavors in science.
In the 1998 Baccalaureate Origins Report, ranking institutions according to the ratio of Ph.Ds granted to bachelors awarded, Earlham College ranked 21st in the Science and Engineering category among all institutions of higher learning. Earlham ranked 12th among other small undergraduate colleges for overall Science and Engineering, 5th in the Geosciences, and 6th in the Life Sciences. The research opportunities described in this document contribute directly to our success in this area.
Undergraduate colleges that are now known as national models for sustaining a student research community environment - Occidental College for example - have clearly demonstrated the importance of undergraduate research opportunities that are broadly available across an entire four year program.
Earlham has a long history of student-faculty research. One of the first efforts was the Soils Program, organized by Jim Thorpe and David Telfair in the early 1960s. Jim Cope and Larry Strong also developed summer-long research projects with students during this same time. While Earlham has never lost sight of its importance, sustaining the summer research community model across the intervening years has often been difficult, leading it to have a somewhat irregular, but persistent, tenure.
Approximately 80% of our science majors carry out research projects or other significant independent work during their Earlham careers. However, with current staffing and funding levels, it is not feasible for us to involve a significant percentage of our science majors in our own research projects based here at Earlham. Instead we encourage our science majors to pursue research through summer or off-campus research programs such as NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs or the Oak Ridge Science Semester program.
In recent years, summer research across the sciences has been supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the National Science Foundation, Petroleum Research Fund, Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, Lilly Endowment, Merck/AAAS, and on a limited basis by the Ford/Knight program. In particular HHMI has funded many student-faculty research teams over the past four summers. With this burst of support we have the beginnings of an extensive multidisciplinary summer research community on the Earlham campus.
Our recent success serves as a proof of concept and as the motivation behind our proposal that the College endow a fund to support an ongoing summer research community in the sciences. The recent HHMI grant gave us a taste of what we can do with relatively long-term support for a summer science research community; we think the time is right to make this a permanent and significant part of the science landscape at Earlham.
The proposed endowed fund would provide a sizable core of students and faculty with local research opportunities. We expect the participating departments and programs to include Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Science, Geology, Mathematics, and Physics.
Given Earlham's enthusiasm for student-faculty research, it is perhaps not surprising that we increasingly expect our science faculty to involve students in research. Currently, this expectation mirrors a national trend and is unique to the sciences. The proposed endowed fund would provide a means of supporting faculty in meeting this expectation.
It is important to note that this fund is not intended to replace or discourage faculty from seeking external funding for research. Rather, it will "fill in the gaps," and enable faculty members to maintain research programs in the long term. One particularly important existing gap that this endowment is envisioned to fill is that of jump-starting the summer research programs of newer faculty members.
We anticipate that a regular summer research community will facilitate the continued development of interdisciplinary collaboration. We recognize the importance of, and potential for, interdisciplinary research projects and for collaboration on a smaller scale between groups working on related problems in different fields. By working in a research environment in which students and faculty are in close communication across disciplines, faculty participants will be better able to integrate the research experiences of our students into the regular science curriculum.
Science faculty have begun to discuss the long term implications of interdisciplinary research at Earlham. One item to emerge is the need for new facilities that will integrate our departments, facilitating the continued development of our joint research projects. If Earlham can develop and fund a vibrant summer research program like the one described here we would have a powerful platform for launching the significant fund raising effort necessary to build these new facilities.
Ultimately we envision a program supporting approximately 15 faculty members and 30 students each year. This would require an annual budget of approximately $321,000 in direct costs, broken down as follows:
Assuming a 4% annual draw, this research community could be supported by a $8 million endowed fund. With the recent donation from David and Carolyn Matthews, we currently have a $167,000 start on this fund. There would also be indirect costs as a result of increased facilities utilization. However, we intend the proposed endowment to be reserved for support of the categories listed above. The suggested numbers within those categories could be expected to vary somewhat from year to year.
Because the costs of this project scale roughly as the number of student/faculty projects supported, we envision a multifaceted approach to building the program. While endowment is being built through the Capital Campaign, faculty will continue to pursue external funding for their research from sources such as HHMI, Research Corporation, NSF and the ACS-Petroleum Research Fund. Coupled with the use of small existing endowments that support students for particular science research areas, this strategy could provide shorter term sustenance for 4 - 8 projects. After the endowment reaches levels sufficient to support 10 or more projects, outside funding will still be sought to support additional projects.
Since scientific research always requires support for capital equipment and facility upgrades over time, areas outside the purview of this particular endowment, there will always be a need for and expectation of grant development beyond the base of support for a summer research community provided by this endowment project. Our past record of success in developing grants for equipment and facilities as well as for student/faculty research and broader science education programs bodes well for our ability to use an endowed base of support to build an even larger and more inclusive range of student/faculty summer research projects into the proposed community model.