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from the issue of September 29, 2005
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Grant links math, biology research
BY TOM HANCOCK, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
A four-year National Science Foundation grant of $710,970 will enable the creation of interdisciplinary teams of select mathematics and biology students to conduct research into projects of interest to both fields of study.
The primary investigator on the grant, announced Sept. 21, is Glenn Ledder, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics. A fifth year of the grant, pending availability of funds and satisfactory progress, will be for $194,030.
The project will focus on field research and mathematical modeling in ecology and population dynamics. The project will build on progress already made at UNL in creating courses that integrate math and biology subjects.
Ledder said there has been a movement nationwide across academia, to promote further integration of biology and mathematics, and UNL has been part of that process.
Courses integrating math and biology subjects already in place, Ledder said, include a new calculus course for biology students, Math 106B. The other new course, Mathematical Methods in Biology and Medicine, is a follow-up course that will be numbered Math 238/838. Funding for this course is from one of the Initiative for Teaching and Learning Excellence grants. These existing classes and new ones under development played a large role in obtaining the grant, Ledder said, as did the resources available at the Cedar Point Biological Station, where students will spend time in summer 2006 working on their project.
The grant will fund the RUTE (Research for Undergraduates in Theoretical Ecology) Scholars Program. Teams will be composed of two biology students, two mathematics students, and at least one faculty member from each discipline. The students will be sophomores or juniors. Math students will have had coursework in biology, genetics and ecology; biology students will have had coursework in calculus and an advanced field of mathematics.
Teams will go through a research process over three academic semesters and one summer. The first group, which will explore the growth and ecology of turtles at Cedar Point, will start in January 2006.
There will be two teams active in following years.
Projects will usually be chosen from work already started by a faculty member from units such as the School of Biological Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Larkin Powell, associate professor in the School of Natural Resources, spent the summer of 2005 measuring and marking the turtles, so students will have a database in place to begin with.
Powell and David Logan, Willa Cather professor of mathematics, will be the first two faculty leaders.
Students will explore background material for their project in the first semester.
The first team will learn about turtle ecology, physiology and math models of animal growth. They will also learn how to conduct fieldwork at Cedar Point, where they will spend 10 weeks in summer 2006 working with the turtles.
Students will analyze data from the Cedar Point trip in fall 2006. In spring students will write a paper and prepare a presentation.
Part of the grant will also go toward recruitment, Ledder said.
Co-investigators for the grant are Bo Deng, professor of mathematics; Irakli Loladze, assistant professor of mathematics; Robert Gibson, professor of biological sciences; and Svata Louda, professor of biological sciences.
GO TO: ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 29
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