The Office of Graduate and Professional Education will foster robust programs of graduate research and education in disciplines where the University of Delaware can achieve international prominence. Universal elements of research-based education, including research methodology and ethics, will be imparted to all graduate students. UD will create new graduate programs, and foster the growth of current graduate programs, to respond to needs and opportunities from the local to the global scale.
Progress update: The Office of Graduate and Professional Education will promote cross-program/college collaborations and increased opportunities for interdisciplinary programs. The Research Office organized and delivered an annual, two-day responsible conduct in research workshop for graduate students campus wide in January 2009. Multiple dissertation boot camps and fundraising and academe preparation workshops were developed in collaboration with units across campus and delivered for graduate students. A new website highlighting external funding opportunities and student accomplishment was launched in May 2009 and articles showcasing graduate student achievement increased significantly.
To attract and maximize the development of talented graduate students, the Office of Graduate and Professional Education will work with colleges to offer all funded Ph.D. and, as appropriate, Master's degree students, continuous (12-month) stipend and tuition support for the expected duration of their studies.
Progress update: A benchmarking study to evaluate stipend levels and other graduate student support for 17 doctoral programs has been completed. The Office of Graduate and Professional Education secured external grants and internal resources to establish a competitive global research travel award program for graduate students to pursue field-based research, internships, and other scholarly and creative opportunities. $102,000 in global research travel grants was awarded 2008-09. This program continues in 2009-10. The first graduate student satisfaction survey was conducted in collaboration with the Graduate Student Senate. A new web-based inquiry management and application system was purchased for use by all graduate and professional programs.
The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources will build research richness that crosses borders and disciplines and employs state-of-the art technology, being mindful of the need to develop and conduct research that has relevance for the well-being of society. The College will conduct research across a continuum of technologies and scales, including field work, organismal studies, cellular and molecular approaches, genomics, and atomic scale work. Faculty and staff will create programs at the interfaces between agriculture and other disciplines garnering all available resources to seek solutions to some of the world's most challenging issues. The College will bridge molecular genomics in both plant biology and avian biosciences with real-world applications in food, agricultural, and environmental sciences.
Progress update: With a recently awarded, three-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Harsh Bais—assistant professor of plant and soil sciences—is teaming up with researchers from the University of California Davis and Delaware State University to uncover the diversity and potential impacts of microbes that literally lie at the roots of rice, one of the world's most important food crops.
Researchers at UD and 17 other institutions will continue avian influenza research under a $5.0 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service. The grant, awarded in 2008 to be spent over three years, renews the Avian Influenza Coordinated Agricultural Project (AICAP), a partnership between the University of Maryland College Park and other leading institutions where avian influenza is being researched across the U.S., including UD.
The College of Arts & Sciences will strengthen and expand its faculty through strategic recruitment and retention initiatives. The College will recruit and retain faculty in interdisciplinary research areas while continuing to improve core disciplinary strengths.
Progress update: Strategic 2009 hires that support interdisciplinary research areas include: a mid-career hire in architectural history in the Department of Art History with interests with interests in design, urban studies, and material culture; hires in the Department of Political Science & International Relations and the Department of Women’s Studies that support multi-disciplinary goals of the Center for Political Communication and Area Studies programs; a mathematician doing research on problems in biology and materials science; and a chaired professor in Computer and Information Sciences who will lead our effort in bioinformatics.
Current faculty searches in the Humanities, specifically in the Department of English, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Department of History, will strengthen core disciplines and enhance interdisciplinary area studies programming and support campus-wide diversity initiatives. Faculty searches in the Social Sciences, specifically the Department of Political Science & International Relations and the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, are being conducted by multidisciplinary committees and are explicitly designed to advance multi-department goals including Area Studies and graduate-level statistics instruction. Current searches in the departments of Biological Sciences, Psychology, and Chemistry & Biochemistry are focused on expanding the research faculty in the strategic areas of Energy, the Environment, and Life and Health Sciences. Two non-departmental searches, in computational science, and bioinformatics and computational biology are also underway. A search for a software engineer will strengthen the research base in Computer & Information Sciences and enable a new professional program.
The Research Institute for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences issued its first call for pre-proposals in Spring 2009 for collaborative projects that will “further enhance established interdisciplinary research strengths.” Final proposals were due September 15 and award notices will be issued by November 1. CFPs for two other internal grant programs, to support distinguished visiting artists and scholars and to support Integrated Semester programming will be released shortly. A grant from the Unidel Foundation will sustain this CAS Research Institute’s work through 2010.
Faculty in the Natural Sciences have been very active in submitting grant proposals. The most complex of these is the Delaware Health Science Alliance (DHSA) effort to apply for a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health. This involves faculty from four colleges at UD and from Thomas Jefferson University, Christiana Care Hospital System, and Nemours Foundation/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children. The $20.0 million proposal, together with matching funds from the State and the four DHSA Institutions, will support research to speed the translation of basic science into new approaches that improve human health. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have opened many new funding programs. Researchers and administrators from the College have worked on teams developing several proposals to ARRA programs for new buildings and core facilities. Over $4 million in ARRA research funding has already been received in Arts & Sciences and many additional proposals are still pending. Recent highlights include two NSF CAREER awards to assistant professors, and the NIH INBRE award which will fund five young faculty in Arts & Sciences.
The College of Arts & Sciences will design graduate programs geared to research prominence and provide students with the resources necessary for success. The College seeks to establish named graduate fellowships with competitive stipends and to increase funds for graduate research and professional development. The College will strengthen graduate minority recruitment.
Progress update: The Arts and Humanities Summer Institute (AHSI) was established in 2007 to address pre-graduate preparation, recruitment, retention, and time-to-degree completion issues that are acute in the arts and humanities. The 4-week Institute recruits nationally, emphasizes the development of strong research and communication skills, and provides students with a strong multi-disciplinary cohort group through co-curricular programming, field trips, and professional development workshops focused on the graduate application process. Participating departments to date have included the Department of Art, Art Conservation, Art History, English, and History. AHSI students live on campus and share some academic programming with McNair Scholars, Undergraduate Research Fellows, and the Community-Based Research Fellows. A 2009 Unidel Foundation grant and match-funding from the College will support this Institute for the next two years.
The College continues its bridge-funding support for the NEH Challenge Grant in American Material Culture studies, providing summer research fellowships to 12 students in our seven contributing humanities departments and interdisciplinary programs: the Departments of Art Conservation, Art History, and English, as well as the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, the Hagley Program in the History of Technology, Preservation Studies, and the PhD. Program in the History of American Civilization. College bridge-funding is also supporting both a two-week public humanities training institute and the annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars at Winterthur.
With support from the Office of Graduate and Professional Education, faculty in the Department of English initiated the highly successful “Dissertation Boot Camps” that were offered in January and June to advanced Ph.D. students across the university. These intensive two-week writing workshops, adapted from similar programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Temple, and Yale, are designed for students who are writing their first dissertation chapters or have found their writing progress stalled.
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment will lead global multidisciplinary research initiatives geared to understanding environmental challenges in the context of the complex relationships that occur between living and non-living resources in both earth and ocean environments. The impact of these research awards will be measured by peer-reviewed publications in top-tier international journals and by graduate student participation in research projects.
Progress update: As of September 2009, 71% of the CEOE research awards are collaborative, 61% of them involve collaboration with individuals that are external to UD, and 67% of the projects can be characterized as multidisciplinary. UD graduate students are supported on 33% of these projects. On July 1, 2009 CEOE changed its name to reflect its broader environmental mission. Marine Programs (Marine Biosciences, Oceanography, Marine Policy, and Physical Ocean Science and Engineering) were clustered into the School of Marine Science and Policy. The Department of Geography and the Environmental Science and Environmental Studies Programs were aligned with the new college.
The College of Education and Public Policy will continue to expand its educational leadership, educational policy, early care and education, and family support programs throughout the state in order to have a major impact on the quality of education throughout the state, region and nation.
Progress update: In January 2009, the School of Education, led by Dr. Nancy Jordan, was awarded a five year National Institute of Child Health and Development grant to examine the development of number sense in young children aimed at creating better instructional curricula for preschool, primary and elementary teachers. In February 2009, the College joined 72 other land-grant and public universities to develop high quality teacher education across the country. In May 2009 the Mathematics and Science Education Resource Center sponsored a school-based mathematics leadership conference attended by over 150 school leaders from the region. In August 2009 the Delaware Center for Teacher Education, under the leadership of Dr. Carol Vukelich, Dr. Martha Buell and Dr. Myae Han, received a three-year, $3.67 million award from the U.S. Department of Education to expand their Early Reading First training in Delaware.
The College of Engineering will strengthen and expand multidisciplinary activities by identifying areas for cluster hires, increasing the number of jointly appointed faculty, and ensuring that policies are in place to encourage these activities in the promotion and tenure process. These actions will begin in Fall 2009, with initial hires starting in Fall 2010.
Progress update: The College of Engineering has identified several thrust areas including bioengineering, composite materials, energy and the environment, infrastructure, IT and advanced computing, nanotechnology, and national security. The College has initiated cluster searches in the areas of bioengineering, composite materials, and energy during the 2009-10 academic year, with the expectation of hiring several faculty in these areas over the next few years.
The College of Engineering is establishing research and graduate education partnerships to support the Army's base realignment effort at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds (Aberdeen, MD). Collaborations will be formed during the Army's transition period under the coordination of the Office of Economic Development and Partnership (OEIP) and in conjunction with the The College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Progress update: Ongoing interactions have led to the identification of a series of graduate courses in electrical engineering that are of interest to engineers at Aberdeen Proving Grounds (APG). A joint masters degree program in Software Engineering has been developed by Computer and Information Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The program will be submitted for Faculty Senate approval during the 2009-10 academic year. A series of CRADA agreements have been established that will enable collaborative efforts between UD and APG. A Center on Information and Communications Systems has been established to build multidisciplinary teams that will work in areas of interest to CERDEC as well as other federal agencies.
The College of Engineering will develop core research facilities needed to recruit and retain top faculty in science and engineering, strengthen and expand doctoral programs, and foster growth and expansion of interdisciplinary research. A plan for core facilities will be completed in Spring 2009.
Progress update: A space study of facilities in the College of Engineering has been conducted. The study has led to a short and long term plan to develop the needed facilities to accommodate the intended growth of the college. Core facilities for the new Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory Building have been developed.
The College of Health Sciences will strengthen and build on the model of the University's Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biomechanics and Movement Sciences to attract top students and faculty who can lead the College and University to prominence in health research and the training of the next generation of health science researchers.
Progress update: The proposal to develop a Ph.D. program in Applied Physiology is being finalized and will be submitted to the Faculty Senate for review in Fall 2009. The curriculum for the Ph.D. in Nursing Sciences has been created and faculty are currently working on developing course objectives and syllabi for the new coursework. This proposal is expected to be submitted to the Faculty Senate for review in Fall 2009. The Department of Health, Nutrition, and Exercise Sciences has hired a scientist (Tom Kepple) from the Center for Physical Disabilities Research at the NIH to serve as an instructor in HNES and in the Biomechanics and Movement Science program.
The Lerner College of Business and Economics will hire, retain and support a diverse faculty capable of producing the best quality and high impact scholarship. A major support for scholarship in many top business colleges is research-focused doctoral programs that provide intellectual stimulation and high quality research assistants to support high-impact scholarships. The College will explore new graduate programs including a college-wide doctoral program in Business to complement the existing doctoral program in Economics. These two Ph.D. programs can serve as the anchors for the excellence of graduate education in the College and will enhance scholarship and instruction.
Progress update: The Finance department graduated its first class in the new Masters program in Finance. In additional, a proposal for a new Ph.D. in Economic Education is well underway, with a planned Fall 2010 start date.
The Research Office is continuing to advance the impact and visibility of UD research and researchers by supporting the highest levels of accomplishment and promoting their impact. The Office is developing the intellectual environment, resources, and facilities that will attract, retain, and nurture outstanding scholars; advance the application of UD research and scholarship through collaboration with the Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships to develop and publicize intellectual property assets, and cultivate and support faculty entrepreneurship, leveraging cooperation with Delaware industries to increase the University's impact as an engine of economic growth; create, with the Office of Communication & Marketing, new vehicles to publicize UD research and researchers; and strategically involve UD and UD leadership in national organizations that enhance the opportunities available to our faculty and students.
Progress update: A new web site has been created by the UD Stimulus Working Group to support UD researchers seeking information on federal stimulus-funded grant opportunities and guidelines and serve as a public record of funding received by UD through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The inaugural issue of the UD Research Magazine was distributed in September 2009.
The Office of Economic Innovations and Partnerships has signed a research partnership agreement with DuPont, developed with the Lerner College of Business and Economics. UD’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem has been developed as a portfolio of collaborations with the Army’s post at APG in education, research and human resources and as a leader for science and technology planning for the State of Delaware.
University of Delaware • Newark, DE 19716 • USA • Phone: (302) 831-2792 • © 2008 
