Pedro Martinez - US grants

Title: Achieving Academic Excellence in STEM

Winston-Salem State University

HRD 0308747

PI: Melvin Johnson

Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) will enhance academic excellence in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and increase the institution's graduation rate of minority students by 50% in selected STEM disciplines. This five-year effort consists of a comprehensive approach to strengthen WSSU's undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructional and research infrastructure with the goal of broadening the participation of underrepresented minorities in the STEM disciplines and workforce.

To achieve this goal, WSSU will: (1) enhance the institution's technology infrastructure by establishing a Testing and Tutorial Center, integrating technology into STEM curricula, training faculty in the use of technology, and developing technology rich curricula; (2) establish a six-week Summer Outreach Science Academy to provide 40 highly motivated high school graduates per year with intensive training in physical science, mathematics, technology, and communication; (3) engage STEM students in undergraduate research and facilitate their successful transition to graduate study in STEM disciplines; and,
(4) provide student support, mentoring, research assistantships, and other academic enhancements.

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is a critical enabler of national importance for expanding scientific discovery and industrial applications. To realize CI?s full potential, domain scientists need to easily run their existing applications on the CI available to them. Scientists also need to be able to design their future applications in a way that allows them to take advantage of an ever-changing and growing CI. However, the current technology used to create CI applications presents two problems: (1) they are either too generic and do not provide the right level of abstraction to allow experts in diverse domains to easily code their application logic; or (2) they are too specific, in most cases following a stove-pipe development process, resulting in rigid and expensive solutions that do not promote the reuse of commonalities across domains.

Leveraging an innovative and successful international industry and university partnership called Latin American Grid (LA Grid) for this PIRE project, Florida International University's (FIU) School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida Atlantic University's (FAU) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and IBM Research Worldwide (China, France, India, Japan, USA), together with the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), Tsinghua University (China), the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), are developing methodologies, platforms, and tools for creating CI applications in a way that eases the application development process and makes the resulting applications more adaptive to future changes of CI. The approach is application-driven and is focused on: (1) supporting CI-enablement for carefully chosen critical application domains, e.g. hurricane mitigation, bioinformatics and healthcare, and (2) developing common methodologies, services and tools for CI-enabled applications in these domains. The technology and tools created by the partners have broad significance and utility to both scientific discovery and industrial/societal applications.

Students from U.S. universities, including underrepresented minorities, are engaged and each participant receives multiple perspectives in each of three different aspects of collaboration as they work with local and international researchers, in academic and industrial research labs, on basic and applied research projects. Consequently, PIRE students are able to participate in the full research pipeline from inception of ideas, through basic research, to practical applications with a wide choice of collaborators and international experiences.

By training a globally engaged workforce and by driving sustainable international partnerships with shared infrastructure and resources, through which faculty, students and industry scientists/engineers collaborate to solve critical and nationally-important complex scientific problems, this activity aims to have a major impact on American competitiveness.

This PIRE project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) with co-funding from the Office of Cyber Infrastructure (OCI).