Category Archives: Funding

Online Education in Science, Engineering and Medicine

The National Academies state that they want to develop websites, podcasts, and printed information featuring the topics in science, engineering, and medicine that concern you the most, and that you’d like to understand better. Great. I am very disappointed in how little great material is available now (from them, and others).

Fill out their survey and hope they hire some people that actually understand the web. I must say the survey seems very lame to me.

The internet provides a fantastic platform for those that have an interest in increasing scientific literacy. But there is still very little great material available. There are a few great resources but there should be a great deal more. The National Academies of Science have a particularly stilted web presence – it is as though the web were just a way to distribute pages for people to print out. Though they are very slowly getting a bit better, adding a small amount of podcasts, for example. While hardly innovative, for them, it is a step into the 21st century, at least.

Some of the good material online: Public Library of Science – Science Blogs – Encyclopedia of Life – The Naked Scientists – Berkeley Course Webcasts – BBC Science News – MIT OpenCourseWare (though it is very lacking in some ways at least they are trying) – TED – Mayo Clinic – Nobel Prize – SciVee

It seems to me universities with huge endowments (MIT, Harvard, Yale, Standford…), government agencies (NSF, National Academies), museums and professional societies should be doing much more to create great online content. I would increase funding in this area by 5 to 10 times what is currently being dedicated right now, and probably much more would be wise. I believe funding this would be most effective way to spend resources of those organizations on what they say they want to support.

Fund Teacher’s Science Projects

With donorschoose.org teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.

Such as: Budding Scientists Need Basics!!! – “My students need 9 hands-on science equipment such as graduated cylinders, magnifying glasses, and vivid photographic books about weather and life cycles so they can experience science first-hand. The cost of this proposal is $386”

Hands On Science! – “My students need a human body model, a skeleton model, a skull model, 2 microscopes, beakers and graduated cylinders. The cost of this proposal is $1,060”

Eyes On Observation! – “My students need 4 Brock Magiscopes. The cost of this proposal is $688”

Let’s Rock the Rocks – “My students needs 2 complete sets of classroom Rock, Fossil & Mineral Collections and a Rock & Soil Activity Tub for science. The cost of this proposal is $351”

You can target high poverty schools, if you wish. If you want to help make a difference in the science literacy of the USA go ahead and find a project you want to help fund and make a donation. Or if you are a teacher, add a project for others to fund.

Britain’s Doctors of Innovation

Susannah Fleming, a PhD student at the University of Oxford life sciences interface doctoral training centre. She is developing a monitoring system to assess children when they first present to medical care. Source

Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, announced the Â£250million (about $370 million) initiative which will create 44 training centres across the UK and generate over 2000 PhD students. They will tackle some of the biggest problems currently facing Britain such as climate change, energy, our ageing population, and high-tech crime.

17 of the centers will put specific emphasis on integrating industrial and business skills with the PhD education. This approach to training has been extensively piloted by EPSRC through a small number of thriving Engineering Doctorate Centres and Doctoral Training Centres in Complexity Science, Systems Biology and at the Life Sciences Interface. This new investment builds on the success of these and will establish a strong group of centres which will rapidly establish a pre-eminent international reputation for doctoral training.

The multidisciplinary centres bring together diverse areas of expertise to train engineers and scientists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle today’s evolving issues. They also create new working cultures, build relationships between teams in universities and forge lasting links with industry.

As I have said before I think countries are smart to invest in their science and technology futures. In fact I believe creating centers of science and technology excellence is a key to future economic wealth.

Full press release: Â£250 Million to Create New Wave of Scientists and Engineers for Britain

HHMI on Science 2.0: Information Revolution

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute does great things for science and for open science. They have an excellent article in their HHMI Bulletin – Science 2.0: You Say You Want a Revolution?

Cross-pollination among research disciplines is in fact at the core of many other popular science blogs. Michael Eisen, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, is an avid blog reader who particularly enjoys John Hawks’ site on paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution. A recent post there discussed a new sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. “It’s like a conduit into another whole world,” says Eisen.
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The current extreme of collaboration via Science 2.0 is OpenWetWare.org. Begun in 2003 by Austin Che, who was then a computer science and biology graduate student at MIT, this biological-engineering Website uses the wiki model to showcase protocols and lab books: everything is open and can be edited by any of its 4,000 members.
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“Most publishers wish open access would go away,” says Brown. It won’t. Major research-funding organizations, including NIH, HHMI, and the Wellcome Trust, now require their grantees to post their findings on openaccess Websites such as PLoS or PubMed Central within 12 months of publication in traditional journals. Publishers are pushing back, however, and in September, the House Judiciary Committee began holding hearings on whether the federal government should be allowed to require grantees to submit accepted papers to a free archive.

DoE: Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program

The United States Department of Education’s Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program (MSEIP) provides funds to schools to provide awards to students. 20 new awards (average value of $139,000) were awarded this year. That brings total funding this year to 71 awards (50 continue from previous years). Institutions recieving funds include: Clark Atlanta University, Rust College, New Mexico State University, Spelman College, Virginia State University and the College of Menominee Nation.

The program is designed to effect long-range improvement in science at predominantly minority and engineering education programs to increase the participation of underrepresented ethnic minorities, particularly minority women, into scientific and technological careers.

Wiley College, one of the new recipients, aims to increase the number of science majors, especially in the fields of biology and chemistry. A key feature of this grant is the creation of a high school science competition that will allow local and regional high school students to visit the campus and compete in a variety of scientific events.

This event will bring five area high schools together to compete in ten scientific events based on biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics. Individual first-place winners will be given scholarships to Wiley College. There will also be an overall grand champion awarded. This event will allow high school students to experience life at Wiley College and the possibilities of a career in science.

“This event not only gives students a financial reason to enroll at Wiley, but also allows them to become familiar with the campus and its faculty and students, said Dr. Shumate. “This grant also furthers a connection between Wiley and both the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Arkansas, allowing current Wiley students to attend these schools in the summer for biomedical research.”

Wiley hosts HS science competition Saturday

Toyota Operates High School in India

Toyota Eyes India Market, Builds School to Get Edge

Built on a rugged hillside in southern India that is populated by wildcats [see below] and monkeys, Toyota’s sprawling technical training school, which opened last year, gives about 180 junior-high-school graduates an education in everything from dismantling transmissions to Japanese group exercises.

Toyota wants to turn students like Satish Lakshman, the son of a poor farmer, into a skilled employee who can boost the auto maker’s fortunes in this key emerging market. “We are learning discipline, confidence and continuous improvement,” says Mr. Lakshman, an energetic 18-year-old.
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At the foundation of its growth plan is the Toyota Technical Training Institute. India’s auto market is growing at such a fast pace that skilled workers are in short supply. Toyota says the school will enable the company to develop the productive, skilled employees it needs.

Toyota has taken a similar approach in China, where it has helped the government run a technical training center since 1990. In India, rival auto makers are following Toyota’s lead. In September, Honda announced plans to open a technical college. Other car makers have formed partnerships with India’s technical institutes to improve training.

The school teaches students practical skills such as welding, auto assembly and maintenance. It also gives the young recruits a smattering of classes in such subjects as math, English and Japanese as well as lessons in the company’s cherished principles of consensus building, continuous improvement and eliminating waste.

Toyota is willing to invest in the long term. A much better sign than a company that is willing to pay their executives salaries that top the wealth of kings. Toyota also believes in education: Idle Workers Busy at Toyota.

Continue reading →

Science, Engineering and Math Fellowships

I work at the American Society for Engineering Education as an Information Technology Program Manager (this blog is not affiliated with ASEE). A large portion of the computer applications I work on are related to the science and engineering fellowships we administer. The fellowship applications are all open now (for certain fields the NSF application deadline is next week). Those fellowships include:

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship has the earliest deadline, starting November 3rd for some while some fields are as late as November 12th. The fellowship provides support for 3 years (a yearly stipend of $30,000 plus educational expense) to approximately 1,000 students and is open to most science, engineering and math fields.
National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship applications are accepted until January 5th, 2009. 200 students receive $31,000 for 3 years plus educational expenses.
Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation Scholarship for Service Program is another Department of Defense fellowship with a deadline of December 15th, 2008. This program offers awards to 200 science and engineering undergraduate and graduate students with awards between $25,000 and $41,000 a year as well as education expenses, health insurance, internships and employment placement after graduation.
NASA Aeronautics Scholarship offers 20 two-year undergraduate scholarships and 5 two-year graduate scholarships to students in Aeronautics and related fields. The deadline is January 16th, 2009.

Other scholarships and fellowships (these are not managed by ASEE): Gates Millennium Scholars Program (January 12th deadline) – NASA Graduate Student Researchers (February 1st) – Goldwater Science Scholarships (January 30th)

NIH Punished Scientist Who Called for Open Records

NIH Punished Scientist Who Had Called for Open Records

The National Institutes of Health and some leading universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, have suffered black eyes this year because of revelations that researchers with federal grants failed to disclose secret payments that they took from pharmaceutical companies.

The NIH was warned about the dangers of the problem years ago by one of its own scientists, Ned Feder, who wrote letters to several publications suggesting that the agency require its grantees to publicly disclose money they earn from medical companies. Instead of heeding Dr. Feder’s advice, the agency punished him
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Dr. Feder went on to suggest that “the NIH could require grantees to make public disclosures of their paid arrangements with pharmaceutical, investment, and other companies, as well as their ownership of stock and stock options, as a condition of having their medical research funded by the government.”

The agency formally reprimanded Dr. Feder for writing to Nature and identifying himself in the letter as an employee of the NIH. Dr. Feder protested the reprimand, and it was subsequently removed, without explanation.
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“The NIH has shown no interest in reforming its policies unless they’re forced to do it,” said Dr. Feder, who is now staff scientist at the Project on Government Oversight.

Stanford Gets $75 Million for Stem Cell Center

Stanford gets $75 million for stem cell center

With today’s announcement, Lokey more than doubles his commitment. School officials say he is the lead contributor for a $200 million stem cell research building that will break ground Oct. 27 and be finished in the summer of 2010. In a statement released by the medical school, Lokey said stem cells would be “as significant as the silicon chip that created Silicon Valley,” producing treatments for disease and saving lives.

He said he was driven to fund research after President Bush, in August 2001, forbid the use of federal funds for stem cell research that involved the destruction of human embryos. “It’s very narrow-minded,” Lokey said of the position. “This is about lives being saved.”
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Some 350 scientists will work in the 200,000-square-foot Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building, the school said. The center is also getting a $43.6 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The institute, the state’s $3 billion stem cell funding unit, was created by a 2004 state initiative from research advocates opposed to Bush’s restrictions.

$92 Million for Engineering Research Centers

photo of Alex Huabg

NSF Launches Third Generation of Engineering Research Centers with Awards Totaling $92.5 Million. Each of the 5 sites will receive will use $18.5 million over five-years. Each center has international university partners and partners in industry.

The NSF Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC), based at Iowa State University, seeks to transform the existing petrochemical-based chemical industry to one based on renewable materials.

The NSF Engineering Research Center for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems, based at North Carolina State University, will conduct research to transform the nation’s power grid into an efficient network that integrates alternative energy generation and new storage methods with existing power sources.

The NSF ERC for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), based at the University of Arizona, will conduct research to create transformative technologies for optical access networks that offer dramatically improved performance and expanded capabilities.

The NSF ERC for Revolutionizing Metallic Biomaterials, based at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, aims to transform current medial and surgical treatments by creating “smart” implants for craniofacial, dental, orthopedic and cardiovascular interventions.

The NSF Smart Lighting ERC, based at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, aims to create new solid-state lighting technologies to enable rapid biological imaging, novel modes of communication, efficient displays and safer transportation.

Photo: Alex Huang will lead direct the research of ways to integrate renewable energy sources into the nation’s power grid at North Carolina State University.