Grant Will Give Math Students Flexibility to Graduate on Time

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 will also work closely with graduate students, post-docs and faculty on research projects. Some qualified students will also 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 they 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 (see sidebar) recently singled out the UA mathematics department for excellence in teaching and its focus on mathematics education and applied mathematics.

Contact: Larry Grove, 520-621-6885, grove@math.arizona.edu



(Sidebar)

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has recognized the mathematics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson as one of the nation's best producers of doctorate-level mathematicians. The UA was one of only five of such departments nationwide chosen for site visits by the Society's Task Force on Excellence.

In its recent publication on the nation's leading doctoral mathematics departments, the AMS task force cited the UA specifically for qualities such as innovative teaching methods, small class sizes and interaction with local high schools.

The task force focused on departments that offer doctoral degrees as a measure of the health of any university math program. These departments produce most of the nation's mathematicians. Much of the new research today, such as computers, physics and biology, are heavily grounded in mathematics.

The task force looked at several aspects of the UA mathematics department. One was entry-level undergraduate courses. Beginning in the mid-1980s the department engineered a complete turn-around in the way it handled lower-division classes. The result was smaller classes and a lower attrition rate. From 1985 to 1990, the passing rate in undergraduate math classes climbed from 55 percent to 77 percent. Enrollment in math classes overall climbed nearly 30 percent in that period.

Another was teaching. Every faculty member in mathematics teaches at the freshman level. The department has boosted its training program for graduate teaching assistants and offers regular seminars and workshops on innovative teaching methods to faculty and GATs. Recently, a non-tenure-track math instructor even won one of the University's highest teaching awards.

The UA mathematics department accomplished much of this by asking the administration for enough money to hire as many as 20 full-time instructors, plus visiting faculty and postdoctoral fellows, rather than tenure-track faculty. The department also started a Ph.D. program in math education to train new teachers, and a Mathematics Center that provides quick advice to undergraduates, including drop-in tutoring.

Also, the recent Cooperative Teaching Program brings in teachers from Tucson-area high schools and Pima Community College to teach, do research and take classes at the UA. The program is expected to improve math education at all levels. Both the mathematics department and the UA Program in Applied Mathematics, in existence since 1978, offer graduate mathematics students research opportunities in science and engineering with faculty members in other departments.

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