We’re No. 1

Per Capita, Macalester Faculty #1 Among Peers for National Science Foundation Grants

Macalester faculty currently hold 24 grants from the National Science Foundation, totaling $3.9 million. On a per-capita basis, that places Macalester number one among 40 peer liberal arts and sciences colleges nationally.

“That we rank first in NSF grants per-capita is a testament to the quality and vibrancy of the research program here at Macalester,” said President Brian Rosenberg. “It’s remarkable that a college our size has so many productive faculty engaged in research.”

Besides supporting research and equipment, a key benefit of Macalester’s research programs is to give undergraduate students research opportunities at a level that is often reserved for graduate students at large research universities.

For example, Chad Topaz, associate professor in the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Department has a $250,000 three-year NSF grant to study biological swarming and chemical pattern formation. The grant funds 12 undergraduate student research positions.

Junior Elise Delmas says she’s lucky to be working with Professor Topaz, “His previous NSF grant has allowed me to work on modeling the movement of locust swarms. Mathematical modeling has never seemed so exciting!”

A recent graduate, Amelia McNamara ’10, who also worked with Topaz says this type of research is “especially hard to come by at the undergraduate level and it makes Macalester stand out.” She’s now working on her PhD in Statistics at the University of California-Los Angeles. “My research experience on pattern formation in chemical systems prepared me for graduate school and made my PhD program applications much more competitive. I am indebted to Prof. Topaz, Macalester, and the NSF for giving me the opportunity to learn these skills.”

Macalester has 163 full-time faculty, which translates to 15 grants per 100 faculty members. That compares to 10 grants per 100 faculty members at Middlebury College and 9 per 100 at Carleton College, for example.

Rosenberg attributes the strong rank to a combination of an active cohort of both active, younger faculty as well as more senior faculty members who consistently receive NSF support and share their proposals with colleagues.

In addition to Topaz’s grant, examples of NSF grant-funded research at Macalester include work to understand the new energy economy, social networks and public health messages, work with the Local Elections in America Project, and T-cell research in an immunology laboratory.

Current NSF grants to Macalester faculty:

Research Title

Principal Investigator

Award to date

Collaborative Research: Networks, Gender, Culture and the Migration Decision-Making Process: A Case Study of the Kazakh Diaspora in Western Mongolia Barcus, Holly $74,510
RUI: Beyond the Standard Model: model building and phenomenology
Ter Veldhuis, Tonnis $60,000 RUI: Combinatorics and Repesentations of Diagram Algebras Halverson, Thomas $120,540 Collaborative Research: GARNET (Geoscience Affective Research NETwork) Wirth, Karl $18,262 COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Evolution & Phylogeny of Titanosauria
Curry Rogers, Kristina $138,836 Developing a Strategic Plan for Macalester College’s Field Station, the Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area
Read: My 300-Acre Lab Davis, Mark $24,575 Flow Cytometry-Based Laboratory Investigations Across the Biology Curriculum
Read: In the Lab of Professor Chatterjea
Chatterjea, Devavani $149,989 RUI: Electronic Spectroscopy and Hyperfine Structure of Metal Free Radicals Varberg, Thomas
$166,810
Into the Community: Changing Perceptions and Increasing Participation in Computer Science Shoop, Elizabeth
$586,500
Phase II: Building a Community around Modeling, Statistics, Computation, and Calculus Kaplan, Daniel
$291,537
Local Elections in America Project (LEAP) Workshop Shah, Paru $49,908 Collaborative Research: CCLI-Responding to manycore: A strategy for injecting parallel computing education throughout the computer science curriculum
Shoop, Elizabeth

$69,194

CAREER:Comparative Osteohistology: Exploring Microstructural Signatures of Environmental Stress in Modern and Fossil Ecosystems
Curry Rogers, Kristina

$160,191

MRI-R2: Acquisition of a High-Power Femtosecond Ti:Sapphire Laser for Ultrafast Terahertz Spectroscopy
Heyman, James

$290,000

Collaborative Research: Local Elections in America Project (LEAP) Shah, Paru
$403,188
HCC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Guiding Folksonomy Development to Enable Novel Tagging Applications
Read: Isaac Sparling talks about his research experience with Shilad Sen, Shilad

$61,386
RUI: Ultrafast Conductivity Measurements of Graphene Films
Heyman, James
$160,000
RUI – Pattern forming dynamical systems in theory and experiment
Swarming Locusts
Topaz, Chad
$250,000
RUI: Synthesis and Reactivity of Coordinatively Unsaturated Zwitterionic Half-Sandwich Group VIII Metal Complexes
Fischer, Paul
$187,000
RUI Collaborative Research: Systematics and Biogeography of Mite Harvestmen of the Australian Wet Tropics
Boyer, Sarah
$285,076
Collaborative Research: GARNET II: Self-regulated learning and the affective domain in physical geology
Wirth, Karl

$43,650

Landscapes of Power: Deliberating the New Energy Economy
Phadke, Roopali
$70,181
MRI: Acquisition of a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer to Facilitate Research and Undergraduate Research Training
Fischer, Paul

$298,600

Social Networks among Marginalized Populations at Risk for Avian Influenzas
Barrett, Ronald

$31,262