STARTING THE PROCESS
Building a new culture for learning
The University of Rhode Island has established a
multidisciplinary research-education partnership program that
emphasizes student participation and outreach to industry. One example
is the Sensors and Surface Technology Partnership.
H
ow can a university foster
multidisciplinary activities if a structure based on separate
academic departments is well established? How can university students
gain a broad range of scientific and technical expertise if most of
them must concentrate on a specific discipline? And how can those
students get hands-on experience with the breadth and flexibility
required to join an industrial research and development team if classes
follow a traditional lecture-based format? Such issues are being
addressed by research universities around the United States.
Researchers (and their funding agencies)--who know that in many fields,
progress now requires contributions from a wide range of
disciplines--are the biggest proponents of a change in teaching
philosophy.
Creating partners
At the University of Rhode Island, one model program gives
students training for the real world. In 1992, discussion about
building a "new culture for learning" began at the university. From
those discussions, two ideas emerged:
- Undergraduate students should be given more opportunities to
engage in hands-on, experiential learning activities.
- Multidisciplinary partnerships for research and education that involve
active student participation should be established.
In 1995 after in-depth consideration, the Faculty Senate
approved a plan to shift $500,000 per year of university funds to
support the establishment of partnerships. The goal of these
partnerships was to encourage multidisciplinary research that
emphasized student participation and outreach to the nonacademic
community. In support of this program, the university president, Robert
Carothers, stated, "It will be into these partnerships that we will
put our precious resources, including institutional funding for
research and service, matching money for federal and private
grants, graduate assistantships, and undergraduate [support]."
After the partnership concept was approved, 10 faculty-initiated
proposals for partnerships were submitted; the Provost's Office with
advice from the Council for Research selected the four that would
receive funding. The criteria for judging the proposals were
- relationship of the partnership's goals to the mission and
reputation of the university,
- capacity of the participating personnel to succeed,
- likelihood of the partnership achieving external funding and
reaching self-sustaining status,
- opportunities for student collaboration, and
- curricular and service opportunities that the partnership could
provide.
The four approved partnership topics are coastal environment,
which combines oceanography and aquaculture with marine affairs and
environmental engineering; infectious disease control, which
concentrates on enhancing disease surveillance, improving
diagnostic capabilities, studying host-pathogen interactions, and
preventing disease; health promotion, which is a social science
activity that studies the effects of behavior modification (e.g.,
smoking cessation) on better health; and sensors and surface
technology, which brings together chemists, physicists, food
scientists, and engineers in studies such as those described in this
article.
The Sensors and Surface Technology Partnership (SSTP), codirected by a
chemist and a chemical engineer, is in its third year. The goals of
this program are to promote research across traditional disciplinary
boundaries in the areas of sensors and surface science, to increase
student involvement in these fields, and to become financially
self-sufficient by the end of the three-year grant period. Currently,
17 faculty (from three colleges and seven academic departments), 18
undergraduate students, and 22 graduate students participate in the
partnership.
Money matters
The SSTP has received university funding totaling about
$375,000 over three years. This sum is not a lot of money by many
standards; however, for a small university with restricted budgets, it
is a significant commitment. By design, most of this money has provided
capital equipment and financial support for participating students.
From the start, a central microscopy laboratory was considered a top
priority, both for the usefulness of the equipment and as a means of
unifying the diverse partnership members. Now housed in a new building
in the engineering complex, the microscopy laboratory includes an
optical microscope with digitizing capability, an atomic force
microscope/scanning tunneling microscope (AFM/STM), and a scanning
electron microscope (SEM) with an energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS)
attachment. The SEM and the optical microscope are networked to a
workstation with a full range of software for image analysis.
Additional purchases include a grazing-angle X-ray diffraction
attachment for the university's X-ray powder diffractometer and
an ozone cleaning system. The SSTP paid part of the cost of
a multifunction surface analyzer that performs X-ray photoelectron
spectroscopy (XPS), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), and secondary
ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). It also contributed to the purchase of a
UV-vis/near-infrared reflection spectrometer. By using the university
money as matching funds and seed money as much as possible, the SSTP
has generated about $200,000 in equipment donations, which include an
ellipsometer, a profilometer, a plasma reactor, computer backup
supplies, and several vacuum pumps.
The SSTP spends about $60,000 a year in financial support to students,
mainly for summer salaries for 8-10 undergraduates and a comparable
number of graduate students. Recipients are chosen by an advisory board
from nominations submitted by faculty. Twenty-five or so additional
students involved in the program receive other kinds of financial
support through grants, teaching assistantships, and other jobs.
Research focus
The SSTP research covers four areas: microsensors,
nanofabrication and microstructural engineering, integrated circuits
and electronic devices, and coatings for corrosion and wear
protection. Critical unifying components of the program are the
microscopy laboratory and an instrumentation directory, which lists
available research facilities in laboratories of individual
investigators (Figure 1).
The faculty members involved in the SSTP always have been active in
research. Many have been involved in collaborative efforts before, but
the SSTP provides a structure that encourages this kind of
interaction; it is more than just a framework within which
collaboration can occur naturally. In addition, a viable, active,
university-supported partnership enhances the credibility and
prospects of multidisciplinary research proposals to funding agencies.
Although we cannot quantify how much participation in the partnership
has benefited individual researchers, the average annual external
funding of faculty members in the SSTP increased from less than
$700,000 before the partnership (seven-year average) to more than $1.1
million in SSTP's second year.
Educational benefits
The primary educational mission of the partnership
concept is to give students the opportunity to be directly involved in
multidisciplinary research. "My friends are amazed at the kind of
work I get to do here," remarked Kambis Anvar, a computer engineering
major and undergraduate program participant. "I never thought in
getting my degree I would be working so directly with faculty, on
really important projects, and with the kind of sophisticated
equipment that we use."
One typical student activity might be to help vacuum deposit a thin
film on a substrate in the chemical engineering facility, examine the
result with AFM in the microscopy laboratory, then return to a
chemistry or mechanical engineering laboratory to help construct a
sensor.
All of the students who receive financial support from the SSTP are
required to present their results at a seminar program that meets once
a week. The seminar is a for-credit course (cross-listed across all
participating majors and departments) that also features faculty and
outside speakers. The makeup of the audience presents a challenge for
the speakers: It is far more diverse than typically found in a
departmental seminar. Student speakers must assume that listeners have
little specific knowledge (e.g., an electrical engineering student may
present to an audience of students whose formal training ranges from
engineering to food science). Consequently, most seminars begin with a
complete, simplified background as an introduction. Speakers have to
completely understand the underlying reasons for the research and
identify cross-disciplinary goals that will help keep the audience
interested. This experience is especially good practice for students
who will work in industry and be required to regularly communicate
results to managers who may have less technical training in the given
area of research.
Outreach
One of the important goals of the SSTP is to foster strong
alliances between the university and industry. Such relationships
provide unique educational opportunities for students, not to mention
jobs for graduates; facilitate technology transfer between the
university and the market; and provide industry--especially small
businesses--cost-effective access to state-of-the-art research.
The SSTP has been successful in attracting the attention of Rhode
Island companies (important for a state university) and national firms.
Local businesses including American Silicon Products, American Power
Conversion, AT Cross, Cherry Semiconductor Corp., Elmwood Sensors, and
Hitech Extrusions, Inc., have worked with SSTP faculty. Companies from
outside the state include Alcoa, Allied Signal Engines, Dow, Pierson
Scientific Associates, Teltron, Inc., and Video Display Corporation.
Research projects with these companies range from fundamental, basic
science to the modification of existing products or processes.
Evaluating progress
The evaluation of the SSTP is a two-part process. First,
faculty and student representatives of the partnership meet with the
advisory board annually for a day-long review. Currently, the advisory
board consists of four members from outside the university (the
president and CEO of Cherry Semiconductor Corp., the CEO of Hasbro, the
president of Fenwall Electronics, and a retired program manager from
the National Science Foundation) and one member from the university
(the vice provost for marine affairs). The board comments on the annual
report, suggests improvements, and recommends routes to pursue in the
upcoming year. In conjunction with the meeting, students present the
results of their research in a poster session. Student participation
adds a personal touch to the program for the board members and also
gives students a chance to impress on the board members the quality of
activities supported by SSTP.
Second, each partnership is reviewed annually by the university's
Council for Research. This faculty group reviews the partnerships'
progress toward their goals and oversees their expenditures. The
SSTP has had consistently positive reviews from the Council for
Research and even has converted some former skeptics to believers in
the partnership concept!
How does one determine whether this program will be of long-term
benefit to the educational and research goals of the university,
that is, whether the university will get an adequate return on its
investment? Currently the university is convinced that the partnership
initiative is an effective use of funds, and the provost has published
a call for proposals to form two new partnerships. Certainly, for
the students and faculty involved in the programs, the
partnerships are an unqualified success. Active student
participation, available central research facilities,
increased multidisciplinary research proposals, and apparently
increased funding levels have had a significant positive effect.
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Figure 1.
