DEFENSE

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.5 million, three-year grant to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and National Computational Science Alliance partners at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and Birmingham. The project will support annual teaching fellowships for graduate students in the science, math, engineering, and technology (SMET) disciplines at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Alabama. The selected graduate fellows will collaborate with campus faculty and participating K-12 teachers to help the teachers integrate computer-based modeling, scientific visualization, and informatics into science and mathematics education. Their goals will be to give both students and teachers a better grounding in science and exposure to tools used in science. In turn, the fellows will improve their own computational skills and learn to relate complex science and mathematics concepts to others. The project is part of the NSF Graduate Teaching Fellowships in K-12 Education (GK-12) initiative. This initiative supports SMET graduate students interested in combining their careers in science with outreach to middle school and high school education. At Illinois, the project extends the impact of EdGrid, a consortium created to develop, implement, and evaluate methods for incorporating technology tools into teacher preparation programs. The EdGrid program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, began in the fall of 1999 (see http://www.eot.org/edgrid/). The GK-12 initiative also compliments NCSA's Biology Student Workbench project, an NSF-funded effort to incorporate bioinformatics into classroom education, and NCSA's ChemViz project, which brings computational chemistry tools into the classroom. The initiative is a multi-departmental effort at Illinois led by NCSA. The departments of chemical sciences, library and information science, life sciences, animal sciences, physics, and mathematics are participating in the program. "We welcome this award, and definitely view it as a challenge. It is one thing to work with teachers on materials for the classroom as we have done in our existing projects, but it is quite another to motivate and enable the young scientists we are mentoring in our graduate programs to become part of K-12 education reform," said Eric Jakobsson, a senior research scientist at NCSA, professor of molecular and integrative physiology, and head of the UI bioengineering program. "We have done this on a smaller scale in the past, and now we will work to scale it up. This will be especially interesting at a leading research university like ours, where scientific research and K-12 education are typically regarded as different worlds. It is the presence of NCSA, with its technological capabilities and tradition of working across boundaries and disciplines, that makes this project possible." Jakobsson is co-principal investigator for the project with Richard Braatz, an NCSA senior research scientist and associate professor of chemical engineering. Umesh Thakkar, the project director and an NCSA research scientist, said the project team will recruit up to seven graduate fellows at Illinois and several at both Alabama campuses. The fellowships begin in the fall 2001 semester. More information is available at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Divisions/eot/gk12/.