Dr. Maria Pellegrini, Program Director W.M. Keck Foundation 555 South Flower Street, Suite 3230 Los Angeles, California 90071 October 27, 2000 Dear Dr. Pellegrini, With this Phase I Letter of Inquiry we are requesting a grant of $652,000 from the W.M. Keck Foundation to support the development of a multidisciplinary summer research community at Earlham with an emphasis on computational techniques and hardware interfacing. The purpose of the proposed project is to prepare students for the increasingly interdisciplinary and technically sophisticated world of science research. In each of the first two years 12 students will receive strong research experiences and develop a good understanding of computer data acquisition and analysis. Institutional Background Earlham College is a private, coeducational, liberal arts college of 1100 undergraduates. Founded in 1847, Earlham is a Quaker college where education is characterized by inclusiveness and diversity, civility, strong science instruction, high academic standards, cooperative learning, and character development. Our approach to science education encourages the full participation of students in the teaching-learning process. This includes collaborative research projects involving students and faculty in introductory and advanced courses, in independent study projects, and in research projects over extended periods of time. Of the 63 papers published by our science faculty over the past five years, 9 have been co-authored with students. Several years ago, we received grants from the Ford and Knight Foundations to support student-faculty research during the academic year. This program continues with a $2 million endowment raised in our last capital campaign. Earlham has a long history of exceptional strength in science education. In the 1998 Baccalaureate Origins Report, ranking institutions according to the ratio of Ph.D.s granted to bachelors awarded, we ranked 21st in the Science and Engineering category among all institutions of higher learning. We ranked 12th among other small undergraduate colleges for overall Science and Engineering, 5th in the Geosciences, and 6th in the Life Sciences. In November 1998, Earlham received a Lilly Endowment grant of $1 million toward a $3.2 million project to renovate our science facilities. An additional $1 million has now been raised in the drive for this project, including 100% participation by the Earlham Board of Trustees. Earlham has received major support for research, curricular, and facility improvements in the sciences not only from the Lilly Endowment, but also from the Fairchild Foundation, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Keck Foundation. Our third Hughes award for $1.1 million was just announced this summer. We are approaching the Keck Foundation again since we know from past experience that an innovative, interdisciplinary program will receive a good hearing. Critical Problem Research in the sciences increasingly involves computer-driven data acquisition and analysis. As instrumentation and analysis software have become more sophisticated, we have become increasingly aware of the "Black Box Phenomenon." Specifically, in many instances students possess only a superficial understanding of the hardware and software they use to acquire and analyze data. From a purely pedagogical standpoint, we feel that it is important that students develop at least a general understanding of the computer systems and hardware they use. Those students going on to careers in science research need opportunities to understand, modify, and extend the capabilities of these systems. This is an educational issue of growing national importance. Project Description With this proposal we are asking the Keck Foundation to fund the first two summers of a multidisciplinary summer research community at Earlham. Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science (CS), Geology, and Physics students and faculty will collaborate on several research projects that cover diverse topics but that intersect in the following four common technical areas: * Spectroscopy * Digital imaging with CCD cameras * Computer controlled acquisition of analog and digital signals * Computational modeling and data analysis We plan to purchase equipment for use in computer driven data acquisition and analysis across the sciences. We are also requesting support for 6 faculty members and 12 student participants per summer for each of two years beginning in the summer of 2002. We provide a rough itemized budget in Appendix A which also serves as a list of planned projects. We are excited by the rich opportunities for collaboration among the planned projects. Students working with CCD images in Geology, Biology, and Chemistry can collaborate on several common acquisition issues: dynamic range of pixels, color or false color interpretations, pattern recognition. Physics and Chemistry students working with data acquisition from various laboratory hardware via USB and serial ports or via direct serial or parallel links to IO cards also face common problems: dynamic range, sampling rates, working with standard communication protocols. The plan to link together computers used for data acquisition and analysis throughout the science complex with a dedicated high speed network offers particularly interesting possibilities for remote data acquisition and for a parallel computation cluster for computationally intensive modeling and analysis projects across disciplines, including problems in flame chemistry, nuclear scattering, and astrophysics. There currently are a number of computing and hardware interfacing projects underway at Earlham that position us well to do the work we describe in this proposal. * The Chemistry curriculum provides a progression from "canned" software packages to student use of spreadsheets and more flexible programming languages in order to develop an understanding in depth of modern data acquisition, analysis, and modeling. Over the past 15 years, applications have been developed in electrochemistry, kinetics, chromatography, image analysis, and spectroscopy, several of them described in publications. * CS majors recently built a parallel computing cluster of 16 PC's running Linux as part of a course in parallel computing. A CS major and physics faculty member are currently using the cluster to perform nuclear scattering calculations. * CS majors administer a collection of 18 student and faculty Linux workstations as well as the parallel computing cluster. * The Physics and CS departments are developing hardware interfacing software on a prototype Linux workstation for use in the advanced physics curriculum. They are also gathering, publishing, and archiving data from a weather station (http://cs.earlham.edu/~weather). We envision research projects involving the use of a wide variety of data acquisition and analysis resources. These range from commercial proprietary software packaged with particular instrumentation, to more general software tools allowing some programming such as LabVIEW or Microsoft Excel, and finally to programming environments that offer complete flexibility. In the latter category, we are particularly enthusiastic about the Linux operating system. The Linux operating system and a wide array of associated software tools, including C, Java, and Fortran programming support, are open source software, that is, the source code for these tools is freely available for viewing and modification. Open source tools allow students to learn many of the details of software and hardware interaction, data analysis techniques, and computational methods that are hidden in proprietary software. These skills and experiences are of fundamental importance in a research environment, and they are common to almost all of the proposed projects. Based on our experience thus far, we advocate a general approach combining commercial software for Windows and Macintosh systems with some analysis and acquisition software developed by students for the Linux environment. We include funds for evaluation and dissemination in the budget (Appendix A, item IV). We plan to evaluate the program yearly, both internally, and with the help of external consultants. We will produce materials for wider dissemination describing our experiences with the multidisciplinary summer research community model. We will also make the software tools we develop available via the Web. It is the very nature of open-source software to be publicly available for use and modification. In conversations with faculty at other institutions we have found strong interest in what we are doing and a readiness to apply our results in their own situations. While our focus in this proposal is on student-faculty research, much of the equipment requested will be used in classes as well. The research we do and the increased collaboration between disciplines will also benefit the curriculum. Many projects will involve using networked computers for remote data acquisition and for remote access of archived data. Resolving these kinds of issues in a research context will also enable faculty to more easily present and manipulate data in the classroom. In order to continue the summer research program proposed here, we are planning a major capital campaign that will include an endowment for summer research projects. In addition, research proposals are being and will continue to be written to the NSF, the Research Corporation, and other sources of funding for summer research. Respectfully, Douglas Bennett President -- Appendix A : Project Budget I. Data Acquisition Projects A. Spectroscopy Projects Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer for our Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) $94,000 Capillary Zone Electrophoresis/ High Performance Liquid Chromatography $47,000 Optical Spectrometer Interfacing Hardware $7,000 Total $148,000 B. CCD Digital Imaging Projects Raman/Fluorescence Spectrometer $92,000 Petrographic Microscope $25,000 CCD Camera for our SEM $15,000 Fluorescence Microscope $10,000 Total $142,000 C. Flexible, Modular Data Acquisition Projects Chemistry Laboratory $55,000 Physics/Electronics/Robotics Laboratory $20,000 Total $75,000 II. Computer Modeling and Analysis Projects Parallel Computing Cluster $63,000 High Speed Intra Science Complex Network $17,000 Molecular Modeling Software $15,000 Total $95,000 III. Student and Faculty Support 6 Faculty Stipends for each of 2 summers @$8,000 $96,000 12 Student Stipends for each of 2 summers @ $3,000 $72,000 Student Housing $14,000 Total $182,000 IV. Evaluation and Dissemination $10,000 Total Budget $652,000 -- Appendix B : Potential Reviewers Luther Erickson Professor of Chemistry Grinnell College Department of Chemistry PO Box 805 Grinnell, Iowa 50112 (515) 269-3011 FAX 515.269.4285 E-mail: ericksol@grin.edu Jan P. Hessler Staff Scientist Argonne National Laboratory Chemistry Division Building 200 9700 South Cass Avenue Argonne, Illinois 60439 (630) 252-3717 FAX 630.252.4470 E-mail: hessler@anl.gov George Lisensky Professor of Chemistry Beloit College Chemistry Department 700 College Street Beloit, Wisconsin 53511 (608) 363-2225 FAX 608.363.2718 E-mail: lisensky@beloit.edu John B. White President North Carolina Wesleyan College 3400 N. Wesleyan Boulevard Rocky Mount, North Carolina 27804 (252) 985-5140 FAX 252.985.5236 E-mail: JohnW@ncwc.edu John White was Dean at DePauw University before he became President at North Carolina Wesleyan. At that time he shared in the management of a curricular and research program at several Indiana colleges suppported by the Pew Foundation. He understands Earlham and faculty/student research in the small college context. James M. Gentile Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Hope College P.O. Box 9000 Holland, MI 49423-9000 (616) 395-7190 FAX 616.395.7923 E-mail: gentile@hope.edu James Gentile has been actively involved on the national scene as an advocate of research for undergraduates. He has served Project Kaleidoscope in a variety of ways and is himself regularly publishing with undergraduates. Kirby Kemper Professor and Physics Department Chair Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306-4350 (850) 644-2867 FAX 850.644.9848 E-mail: kirby@nucott.physics.fsu.edu Kirby Kemper is a regular participant in the NSF funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Florida State University. He can also comment on the importance of Linux in a research context. The nuclear research group at FSU, of which he is a part, has used the Linux operating system in both hardware interfacing and data analysis for several years. -- ___________________________________________________ Lew Riley http://cs.earlham.edu/~rileyle Earlham College Department of Physics and Astronomy (765) 983-1435 (765) 983-1497 (FAX)