Undergraduate Faculty

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES FOR FACULTY AT PRIMARILY UNDERGRADUATE INSTITUTIONS

As part of plant functional genomics grants to MSU researchers, NSF is providing funds to support paid research experiences for faculty from primarily undergraduate-serving colleges and universities. Our goal is to place one faculty member per year in one of the participating laboratories at Michigan State University. Participating faculty members will perform bench research related to chloroplast cellular biology, metabolic genetics, metabolic flux analysis or other topics of interest. There also are opportunities for faculty who are interested in gaining more experience in bioinformatics. Michigan State University has a large number of laboratories conducting basic and applied plant biology research, providing a fertile environment for training (see for example http://www.bch.msu.edu/research/plant/plant.htm).

It is anticipated that one slot will be funded for 8-12 weeks each summer, modeled after the NSF Research Opportunity Award (ROA) supplement program. It is also possible to structure these collaborative experiences as sabbaticals during the academic year. Because we will run a parallel summer REU program, we encourage faculty to have one or two of their students participate, allowing them to spend the summer performing collaborative research while at MSU.

In addition to research opportunities the summer program will offer formal instruction in LON-CAPA for all project participants. LON-CAPA is an innovative web-based course management system developed at MSU and supported by MSU and NSF. LON-CAPA is similar to commercial course management systems but contains a network of shared educational resources (open source freeware) including the ability to create and grade individualized problems for quizzes, homework and examinations (www.lon-capa.org/problems.html). The program is used by more than 21 universities in the US and abroad as well as by community colleges and high schools (www.lon-capa.org/institutions.html), serving tens of thousands of students each semester. LON-CAPA is recognized for achievements in learning and teaching, receiving the ComputerWorld 2004 "21 st Century Achievement Award in Education and Academia", and the 2004 Sloan Consortium Award for Most Outstanding Effective Practice (www.lon-capa.org/award.html).

To learn more about this program contact:

Rob Last
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Michigan State University
301 Biochemistry Building
East Lansing, MI 48824

517-432-3278
lastr@msu.edu