Wesley College Ignites Potential with Undergraduate Research Program.

Abstract

Two long-term grants from federal research and infrastructure-building programs are helping shape a sustainable campus-wide culture of undergraduate research at Wesley College in Dover, Delaware. Both interdisciplinary grant programs have been instrumental in expanding the undergraduate research capacity in science at Wesley and in increasing Wesley faculty members’ research collaboration throughout the state with partnering institutions, state agencies, and private industry. The IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, focus on building biomedical research capacity. The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is a federal grant program of the National Science Foundation that seeks to strengthen research and education in science and engineering in states that historically have not been leaders in winning federal research grants. Besides helping faculty focus their research programs, the two programs bring undergraduates into closely mentored, high-tech science research projects. Students conduct research both during the academic year and in full-time summer internships. Most students in the programs participate throughout their four years at Wesley. The research the students do has real and practical implications, and gives students research opportunities they would not otherwise have had. Some students are studying the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus transported into Mid-Atlantic rivers, exploring the reactivity of medicinally useful organic compounds, helping to improve a database of chemotherapy drug properties as an aid in the drug-development process, and developing a database of the many pesticides used in the state. NIH and NSF established the programs to build research and education capacity through statewide programs, typically with a research university as the lead institution; the lead institution then partners with other clinical or academic institutions. In Delaware, the programs are led by the University of Delaware, and Wesley College is one of six partners in the state. In 2009 the Delaware network received its most recent grant from the NIH program, for $17.4 million over five years.

Keywords

Affiliated Institutions

• Wesley College US

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