A Research Renaissance

Faculty research funding successes benefit students and bolster reputation for academic excellence.
by Barbara Mulligan

Four decades have passed since Bernard Fried first set foot on the Lafayette campus, fresh from a fellowship at Emory University, eager to teach biology and learn more about parasites. He immediately began mentoring students and working with them on research projects.

Within three years, Fried had landed his first research grant from an outside source—$60,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

to study the effects of transplanting turtle blood flukes from their natural hosts to an artificial site. "The grant allowed me to hire a technician and to buy some equipment," says Fried, Kreider Professor Emeritus of Biology and a world-renowned authority in parasitology. That early grant—the first of many—helped show his peers both on and off campus the value of his work, Fried says. He went on to do research with 200 students, publishing scientific papers with about 150 of them. In those days, Fried was among only a handful of professors at Lafayette—and at undergraduate colleges nationally—seeking funding for their research from sources outside their institutions.

Physics faculty members David Hogenboom (center) and Andrew Dougherty review NASA research with Simon Mushi '06.

Today is much different. In the last three academic years, more than 50 Lafayette faculty have received grants and fellowships from more than 30 foundations, societies, funds, government agencies, and other organizations, ranging from well-known names like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA to specialized sources, such as the Irish-American Cultural Institution and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

One of them is David Hogenboom, Metzger Professor Emeritus of Physics. Having retired in 2000 following a Lafayette career that began in 1965, Hogenboom continues an active research program, sparked most recently by a $153,000 NASA grant for experimentation on salt solutions believed to be important constituents of an icy ocean on Europa, a moon of the planet Jupiter.

Working with Hogenboom, along with professional colleagues Andrew Dougherty, associate professor of physics, and Jeffrey Kargel of the United States Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., is Simon Mushi '06. He's one of many Lafayette students who benefit from opportunities to collaborate with faculty on research projects—many of which are funded by outside agencies—through the EXCEL Scholars program.

EXCEL Scholar Stephanie Stawicki '04 with Joshua Sanborn, assistant professor of history, research Russian soldiers and civilians during World War I.

Elements of Success Amid full schedules of teaching and mentoring students, Lafayette faculty conduct scholarly research-and seek grants—in all sorts of areas, exploring everything from the substance of the solar system to the sonnets of Shakespeare. In the new millennium they're pulling in grants in record numbers from increasingly diverse sources. Funding for the 2000-01, 2001-02, and 2002-03 years totaled nearly $4.5 million, more than triple the amount of the previous three-year period. And faculty already have secured more than $1 million in grants and fellowships in the current 2003-04 academic year, promising to exceed last year's record high of $1.9 million. Provost June Schlueter attributes the dramatic increase to a number of factors. "First, the academic culture has changed in that there's a greater emphasis now than there was a decade ago on the teacher-scholar model," Schlueter says.

Also fueling the upsurge—and benefiting from it—is the increasing popularity of Lafayette's distinctive EXCEL program, Schlueter says.

In EXCEL, students work with faculty on the faculty member's research while earning a stipend. More than 180 students participate in the program each year (up from 16 in its initial year, 1986), and many publish co-authored papers in scholarly journals and/or present their research at professional conferences. "EXCEL engages students in intellectual partnerships that not only introduce them to the methods and ethics of research but also expose them to, and engage them in, the highest level of work and thought," Schlueter says. "The refereed journals that have accepted our student-faculty co-authored papers testify to the fact that undergraduates can have a home in the arena of high ideas."

Paul Coppinger, a consultant for the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), says, "Lafayette's faculty have an intense and enthusiastic commitment to conducting research with their undergraduate students and its institutional commitment to its research orientation is genuine, pervasive, and successful."

Coppinger visited the College in May, when NAPA, an independent government agency conducting a Congressionally mandated study of NSF, sent him to seek information at three small colleges with "relatively high" levels of NSF funding. He and his NAPA study team, which visited Lafayette, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr, learned that Lafayette had 18 active NSF grants at the time. "Besides the high number of awards, the study team observed two additional notable characteristics in Lafayette's NSF portfolio," Coppinger says. "First, many of these NSF awards were in very competitive programs where NSF's merit review process funds only

Sharon Jones (left), associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, mentors Nicole Joy '04 on her senior honors thesis examining arsenic contamination in water in Arizona's Tohono O'odham Nation.

"Undergraduate research opportunities are rare in most academic institutions and Lafayette is very special with regard to the variety of research possibilities it offers its students," Coppinger says.

A new enhanced sabbatical policy for tenured faculty also has contributed to the increase in grants, Schlueter adds, as has Nancy Ball, director of sponsored programs, whose job involves learning about grant and fellowship opportunities, notifying faculty of those opportunities, and helping them wade through complicated multi-page applications.

"She knows what the foundations want and is able to shape the applications toward that," Schlueter says.

"It was obvious how important Nancy Ball was to making the process go at Lafayette," Coppinger adds. "After visiting some very large research institutions, I've come to appreciate how valuable one-person enterprises can be."

Finding a Balance Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says finding a complementary relationship between teaching and scholarship was among her primary concerns when, after spending six years as an associate professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, she began looking for a new position. At Rose-Hulman, Jones worked on projects funded by a number of organizations, including NSF. After spending the 2001-02 academic year on sabbatical leave developing geographic information system (GIS) structures for the Tohono O'odham Nation in southwestern Arizona, she joined the Lafayette faculty last fall.

Elaine Reynolds (center), assistant professor of biology and chair of neuroscience, examines mutant Drosophila flies that have seizures similar to epilepsy with Kathleen Devlin '03 and Jacobi Cunningham '03. Reynolds has just received a $169,000 grant from NSF to continue this research.

Last spring she included GIS in her Applied Systems Analysis for Engineering Policy and Management course (for which she received an Information Literacy Grant from Lafayette) and in the summer, under a NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship, developed and used web-based, state-of-the-art GIS technologies for infrastructure management at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

She has mentored a growing number of students in EXCEL research focusing on her work with the Tohono O'odham Nation and NASA and is currently overseeing senior honors research by Nicole Joy '04.

"I was trying to find an undergraduate institution that values excellence in teaching and excellence in research," says Jones, who teaches a full load of courses and is adviser for students in the bachelor of arts program in engineering, the Leonardo Society for A.B. engineering majors, and the Minority Scientists and Engineers Society. "I was looking for a school that has a balance."

Yvonne Gindt, assistant professor of chemistry, says EXCEL Scholars play an important role in her research on protein folding and aggregation. She says a $138,862 NIH grant she received this spring will go a long way to support that work, which promises to help scientists better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Gindt and her research students, including Meghan Ramsey '04, frequently use a $25,000 fluorimeter she bought after receiving the grant. The deceptively simple-looking boxlike instrument, housed in her Hugel Science Center laboratory, measures the fluorescence of molecules, helping the researchers monitor the protein folding process.

"This project was very exciting because proteins are essential components of organisms, including humans," says Ramsey, a Goldwater Scholarship recipient, neuroscience major, and varsity soccer standout. "When Prof. Gindt asked me to stay for the summer to work on it,

Meghan Ramsey '04 (right) investigates the structure and folding of proteins in an EXCEL research project with Yvonne Gindt, assistant professor of chemistry.

I felt it was an opportunity to learn a great deal and help direct my career goals. I don't think I would have had such an opportunity at many other schools." Gindt and Jones agree that in addition to benefiting EXCEL Scholars, their research has helped them become better teachers. Joshua Sanborn, assistant professor of history, finds his research influences his interactions with students in the classroom and those working on senior honors theses and independent study. "It makes you smarter and more well-rounded," he says. "It's impossible for me to imagine being a college professor without doing research."

Enhancing Experience
Sanborn, who joined the Lafayette faculty in 1999 after earning a Ph.D. in Russian history from the University of Chicago, has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

He points out that getting a small grant or some internal funding can often make the difference in getting a project established and using that record to secure more and better grants and fellowships.

"Foundations don't fund a lot of speculative projects," he says. "The more money you get, the more you're able to leverage."

Gindt says she too has found this true, pointing out that the internal funding she received after arriving at Lafayette from the University of Nebraska at Kearney helped her establish her laboratory and conduct enough preliminary research to land her NIH grant.

THEN AND NOW

EXCEL Enhances Student Research

The summer before his senior year Jeff McCafferty '89 was busy collaborating with Ilan Peleg, now Charles A. Dana Professor of Government and Law, on research for a book about human rights in Israel's occupied territories. McCafferty, now a learning consultant in Virginia, was one of 23 students working with faculty as research assistants under the EXCEL Scholars program. Having been piloted two years previously with 16 students participating, EXCEL was then still a summer program and hadn't yet taken its present name.

Jeff McCafferty '89 and Ilan Peleg, Dana Professor of Government and Law.

The early years of EXCEL were also the early years of the annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). The inaugural NCUR was held in spring 1987. "Professor of Chemistry John Stevens [of host University of North Carolina at Asheville], who conceived and chaired the conference, expected perhaps 200 students from schools within a 500-mile radius. . . . Instead, the conference drew 500 students, faculty, and administrators from institutions nationwide," according to a 2001 Caltech study on undergraduate research for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Now about 2000 students give oral presentations, posters, performances, and exhibits at NCUR annually.

Lafayette sent its first delegation-just four students-to NCUR II in 1988 and hasn't missed a year since. The College's representation at the national conference has grown along with the EXCEL program. Lafayette's group is always one of the largest among schools of its size at NCUR. About 450 Lafayette students have participated in NCUR, with an average of 30 per year over the last seven years.

Since last year, Lafayette has been encouraging tenured faculty to leverage time away from teaching duties into research dollars with an enhanced sabbatical program that offers a full year of leave at 80 percent pay to professors who seek external funding for their research.

"You don't have to be successful in getting an outside grant, but you do have to apply," Schlueter says.

Currently, four Lafayette professors are on enhanced sabbatical, including Ian Smith, associate professor of English, who is finishing work on a book to be titled Barbarian Errors: Race and Rhetoric in Early Modern England. He will begin a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., this winter.

"When you do that kind of archival research, your thinking changes as you get a firmer grasp on your field," Smith says. "When you come back to the classroom, you redesign courses. I think students appreciate and value that."

Smith, who joined the Lafayette faculty in 1995, has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, French government, Clark Memorial Library, and Newberry Library. He says each experience has given him more to think about—and raised more questions.

Michael McFadden '04 studied portrayals of dark-skinned characters in Elizabethan theater with Ian Smith, associate professor of English.

"It's not as if I'm saying 'here's the answer' to my students," he says. "I see teaching as a journey."

For faculty such as Hogenboom, Fried and Joseph Sherma, Larkin Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, that journey has continued even after they've "retired" from the classroom. The two began in 1980 to conduct joint research combining Fried's work in parasitology and Sherma's work in thin layer chromatography, and they continue to work in their laboratories each day, mentor EXCEL students, and obtain the occasional grant-most recently, $20,000 from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation awarded to Sherma.

In addition, Ball says, research like Hogenboom's, conducted in collaboration with other institutions, is becoming more common at Lafayette, and promises to bring even more success to the College.

"It's great that people are willing to take the risk and try," she says. "As the dollars have grown, so has the enthusiasm."