College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Invigorating

Although a NSF grant is based in the statistics department it will provide interdisciplinary research opportunities across campus.

Dean Isaacson knows the new five-year $2.2 million VIGRE grant that his department has received from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will benefit his faculty and students.

He's hopeful that other academic departments across campus will be able to take advantage of it as well.

"We're not just looking for statisticians," the professor and head of the statistics department said. "I hope we can find postdocs and graduate students who are interested in statistics as well as sociology, engineering, computer science, mathematics, psychology, genetics–any number of academic disciplines.

"The program is designed to increase the level of interdisciplinary research opportunities for faculty, both across areas of research in statistics and mathematics, and across boundaries of the mathematical and applied sciences," he continued.

The statistics department is the recipient of the NSF grant, which will provide financial support for undergraduate and graduate students in statistics and postdoctoral fellows.

The grant has been initially funded for $2,278,766 for the five years. The statistics department will receive $1,293,228 for the first three years.

"After that the program must be reviewed," said Mark Kaiser, associate professor of statistics. "That means the other $985,536 has been approved on merit but the funds have not been allocated."

"The VIGRE program is designed to benefit the mathematical sciences by bringing together working groups consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty," Isaacson said. The grant will eventually provide funding for 14 graduate fellowships, eight postdoctoral fellows and 12 undergraduates.

Participants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents to be eligible. The VIGRE grant will pay half of the cost of a postdoctoral fellow. Isaacson is seeking candidates for these positions with dual interest in statistics and another academic discipline, thus requiring both departments to pay for only one-fourth of the cost of such an individual.

Postdoctoral fellows can be in the program for up to three years.

"The traditional role and motivation for someone to become a postdoc is to get out research papers," Kaiser said. "Part of the idea behind the VIGRE grant is also to provide them the experience of research, teaching and professional practice.

"The idea is to prepare postdocs to enter an academic career."

The structure of the program will also provide graduate students the opportunity to incorporate research and interdisciplinary problem solving into their educational experience at an early stage. Graduate students can be funded for the full five years of the grant.

Undergraduate students will be on the Iowa State campus during the summer months and assigned to an ongoing research group.

Students will spend the first week of the eight-week program interacting with their working group before working on a research project for the next six weeks. The final week will be used to prepare a paper which will be presented at a conference for VIGRE participants.

"The idea is that these undergraduate students will not be statistics majors," Kaiser said. "Hopefully they will have majors in several academic areas across campus."

It's that interdisciplinary activity that excites both statistics professors.

"There is an opportunity for almost every department in LAS and many other departments across campus to benefit from the VIGRE grant," Isaacson said. "In fact everyone wins - the undergraduate gets experience while the graduate student, postdocs and faculty members get involved with working research groups."