California State University, Northridge Behzad Bavarian Northridge, CA $500,000 2008 The College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS) at California State University Northridge (CSUN), in collaboration with the College of Science and Mathematics (CSM), will acquire a Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM) with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS). This system will provide the fundamental tools needed by faculty and students in the interdisciplinary Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education (NUE) program to investigate the complex phenomena that occur at the nanosize scale, and should advance the overall goal of bridging experimental and theoretical approaches to nanotechnology in research and teaching. The FESEM-NUE project will greatly enrich both colleges undergraduate curricula, increase early student exposure to nanotechnology, provide opportunities for student participation in sophisticated academic-industry research collaborations, and grant diverse students a competitive advantage for graduate studies and careers while meeting their financial needs. The project builds upon earlier curricular advances and student research engagement achieved with advanced computing equipment and sensitive microanalytic instrumentation acquired under a prior W. M. Keck Foundation grant.   Grant Abstracts 2008   Simmons College Leonard Soltzberg Boston, MA $245,000 2008 The Undergraduate Laboratory Renaissance program will replace closed-end laboratory experiments with research-based laboratory work in each area of undergraduate science. A project based on a faculty member's research will form the basis for the semester's laboratory work, with teams of four students working on different aspects of the project. Upper-division majors will mentor students in research methodology and instrumental techniques. To coordinate research activity among several laboratory sections meeting each week, a Wiki-based laboratory notebook will be used to communicate results. When this research-based program is fully implemented, all students contemplating majors in chemistry, biochemistry, chemistry/pharmacy, and biology will participate in research beginning in the sophomore year following an introduction to research methodology during the spring of their first year.   University of California, Los Angeles Willeke Wendrich Los Angeles, CA $500,000 2008 UCLA has identified, as a critical next step in its Digital Humanities initiative, the creation of an undergraduate curriculum in the emergent field of digital cultural mapping. By integrating Geographic Information Systems into traditional methods of humanistic inquiry, digital cultural mapping uses informatics, spatial modeling, and time-space visualizations to create new tools and methods for investigating cultural, historical and social dynamics. Building on the tradition of a liberal arts education at UCLA, the curriculum will teach students critical reasoning, sound judgment, intellectual openness, and team-based problem solving. Students will learn to utilize, create, and evaluate the tools and technologies related to the geo-temporal web, a global information network in which location and information have merged together and datastreams are organized, processed, and viewed according to the parameters of space and time. The curriculum is unique because it draws faculty from seven different disciplines, bridges the resources of three research and teaching centers at UCLA, and uses new geo-technologies to develop collaborative, project-based approaches to learning with real-world applications.