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- Research Has Proved Very Meaningful
to Students, Faculty, and Environmental Organizations
- Such Experiences Are Truly Wonderful
Learning Experiences
- Such Experiences Change Student Lives
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I have found that doing summer research with students is an exceptionally
rewarding and effective form of teaching. In most teaching/learning
environments, students do not typically provide services to anyone
outside the working environment. Thus, students often do not have
the satisfaction of seeing their work actually needed, desired, or
used by anyone other than the instructor or principle investigator.
During our research collaborations with environmental groups, students
have been able to apply their knowledge to the creation of a real
product and have seen their work genuinely used by a group of people
outside of the research team.
I am personally very proud of the collaborative work with the
Kentucky Environmental Foundation (KEF). The US Army recently decided
to seriously consider options to incineration for the disposal of
the chemical weapons stored at the local Army site and has allocated
$40 million dollars to investigation of alternative technologies
for the disposal of these chemical weapons. Our research teams are
not claiming responsibility for these results of activism. However,
the topics of our researches have been chosen to address the questions
brought about by the KEF investigations, and in each case our research
teams were able to provide KEF with unbiased answers to their questions
which helped them to focus their efforts. Our research teams have
also been able to provide advice to the KEF on particular technical
issues such as reasons to consider alternative technologies, and
the identification of questionable underlying modeling assumptions
used by the Army in their risk analyses. The experience of explaining
mathematical results to non-mathematicians is one which is common
in the life of an applied mathematician but is unfortunately uncommon
in the classroom. Our research teams have met regularly with the
members of the KEF to clarify modeling assumptions and to explain
modeling results, and explaining our work to members of the KEF
was one of the important benefits of the experience for the students.
In our research projects I have delighted in helping students
to synthesize and add to their knowledge base as well as to develop
confidence in their abilities. Of the first six students with whom
I have had the pleasure of working closely in the summer, four of
them indicated that the research experience helped them to make
a decision about their career path. Of our research students graduating
in 1998, Whitney Blackburn went to graduate school in Environmental
Engineering, Srabasti Dutta went on in Applied Mathematics, and
Brian Moyers went on in Biostatistics. I couldn't be more proud.
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