$2.2 Million NSF Grant Awarded to Mathematics to Aid Student Research

Jeff Harrison
Jan. 5, 2000


Graduate student Andre Lehovich studies medical imaging, analyzing fluid flow in an artificial heart. He is one of a number of students at the University of Arizona who will benefit from a new National Science Foundation grant designed to aid student research and shorten graduation time.

NSF has awarded the UA mathematics department and the Applied Mathematics Program a five-year, $2.2 million grant to support approximately 18 graduate students, 25 undergraduates and four postdoctoral fellows each year.

The goals of the Vertical Integration of Graduate Research and Education (VIGRE) grant are to shorten the time the students need to earn their degrees and to expand their career opportunities, says Larry Grove, the principle investigator for the grant and a professor in the mathematics department.

While most of the VIGRE grant is directed toward supporting graduate students, it also targets undergraduates, encouraging them to pursue careers in mathematics either as teachers or in research and industry. Undergraduates will be eligible for one-semester assistantships worth up to $1,200 in either research or teaching, as well as summer support and travel to research conferences.

Undergrads also will work closely with graduate students, post-docs and faculty on research projects. Some qualified students also will be able to help in teaching, typically assisting professors in second semester calculus. All will be required to write reports about their activities, and each semester will present their work at a research conference on campus, with the best going on to regional and national conferences.

Graduate students in the VIGRE program will get full-support fellowships for as long as 33 months. Eleven UA students will begin the program this spring semester, representing a wide range of research activities. Lehovich is one. Another, Guadalupe Lozano, studies symplectic geometry, with an eye toward applications to dynamical systems. Grove anticipates that several more graduate students will begin to receive support in fall 2000.

Grove says one post-doctoral fellow has already been hired. Another will begin in the spring and two more will come to the UA next fall.

NSF made VIGRE awards to fewer than twenty schools nationally. Grove says the grant will make an attractive recruiting tool in helping to attract star students and post-docs.

The UA mathematics department and the Applied Mathematics Program have risen to national prominence in recent years, buoyed in large part by exceptionally strong programs in pure and applied mathematics, and also by a notable mathematics education curriculum, as well as collaborative ties to other departments on campus, such as optical sciences, engineering and medicine.

Math also was instrumental in helping the UA garner a $500,000, three-year NSF Recognition Award for the Integration of Research and Education (RAIRE) for $500k over three years, said Randall Richardson, associate vice president for undergraduate education.

"Math was instrumental because it helped reform the College of Science promotion and tenure process to give much greater weight to contributions in math and science education," Richardson said.

The American Mathematical Society Task Force on Excellence recently singled out the UA mathematics department for excellence in teaching and its focus on mathematics education and applied mathematics.

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