Grant to fund undergraduate research

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Deborah Walters and Joseph Gardella, Jr. of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) have been awarded a $150,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop a community-linked interdisciplinary research (CLIR) program for undergraduate students at UB.

UB will match the Hewlett Foundation grant, making a total of $300,000 available to fund the new initiative, say Walters, associate professor of computer science and associate dean for undergraduate education, and Gardella, professor of chemistry and associate dean for external affairs.

The goal of the program, according to Walters and Gardella, is to involve nearly all undergraduates in multi-semester, interdisciplinary research activities.

Projects will be developed and conducted under the direction of both faculty members and the personnel of for-profit and non-profit corporations and agencies in Western New York. They will be designed to enhance undergraduate learning and benefit the research needs of a broad range of community groups.

Walters says the program will be structured to operate without incurring additional costs. Participating for-profit corporations that will benefit from the service will be charged a fee, which will be used to cover the cost of the program.

The program is one of 10 being funded this year by the Hewlett Foundation through an initiative whose purpose is to enhance general-education programs at research universities. UB already offers a number of research-based courses on the undergraduate level in CAS, as well as in many of the university's professional schools. But the Hewlett grant will permit the development of many more such programs and ultimately, the involvement of several thousand undergraduate students.

Walters and Gardella say the program has other benefits as well. It will permit participating faculty members to spend more time supervising student research without increasing their own workload. And it can serve as a recruitment tool.

"We know from past experience that active learning through real-world research has always enriched the education of participating students, regardless of which school or departments sponsor the project," Walters says.

"UB already conducts community-based research programs through our Graduate School of Education and the schools of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Related Professions, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Information Studies, Social Work, Architecture and Planning, and other professional schools.

"Although these may be more visible and more familiar to the public than those conducted by the humanities departments in CAS, we sponsor many community research programs as well," she says.

Walters cites environmental audits conducted on behalf of community entities by the CAS Interdisciplinary Program in the Social Sciences, as well as the history department's industrial heritage and many oral-history projects that collect and catalogue primary historical research materials.

Online childhood cancer education-and-information projects initiated by the Department of Art with the Graduate School of Education, Kaleida Health's Children's Hospital and Roswell Park Cancer Institute and maintained by UB continue to help hundreds of child cancer patients, their families, schools and friends understand and articulate their feelings about dealing with the disease and its treatment.

"Our departmental community research programs in anthropology, geology and archaeology have explored the physical and cultural history of our region, ascertained the importance of our physical artifacts, our geology and geography, and applied current science in ways that have assisted Western New York community entities from police departments and native tribal groups to preservationist and environmental organizations," Walters says.

"These programs deeply enrich the educational experience of many UB students and, we hope, will encourage more students to enroll in research universities like ours, which are the only institutions of higher education able to offer programs of this kind."

She emphasizes that the CLIR projects will be organized as courses "taught" as part of faculty members' normal instructional load, adding that this should increase the number of faculty able to participate in the program. Supervisory assistance by community participants and graduate students will free faculty members to pursue greater and more direct instructional contact with students.

Walters points out that since undergraduates will participate for more than one semester, returning students will be able to coach and mentor new participants.

And through research projects affiliated with local service organizations, students will participate in scholarly investigations that have public-policy implications, she explains.

Gardella notes that one project already being planned involves students assisting in the development of Buffalo.com, the Web site of The Buffalo News. Another idea that has been proposed, Walters says, involves a vast collection of stereotypical Civil War images held in the collection of the former Viewmaster Corp., now owned by Fisher Price.

"These need to be made available for use by historians, art historians and media artists, among others, and this offers our students an important object lesson in identifying and cataloguing primary historical research materials.

"The classics department," she adds, "is interested in its students helping to assess and catalogue the Roman art holdings of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society and the suggestions have just begun to come in.

"These research projects will not be the same as internships, and we need to clarify that point," Walters says. "They will be supervised research programs attached to specific undergraduate courses.

"In fact," she says, "in some ways, this initiative may have broader appeal to industry and community groups than do internships because they involve lower personnel costs than do internships that require one-on-one supervision. CLIR programs also may allay employer misgivings that, in some cases, the length of an internship is too short for maximum educational impact.

"In the CLIR programs, we'll lengthen the learning curve by involving teams of students, including research-experienced graduate students, over the course of several semesters. This approach," explains Walters, "will provide students with lengthier, on-site experiences and enable them to learn to work effectively as members of a work group, even as they develop practical, cost-effective solutions to real-world problems."

Working with university teams and members of the community, she says, also will require students to develop proficiency in written and oral communication.

Faculty, students, staff and members of the community may suggest projects to the CLIR team via email to walters@buffalo.edu or gardella@acsu.buffalo.edu. Write "CLIR Project Proposal" in the subject line.