Dr. Tony Frank Appointed to Department of Commerce Advisory Committee
U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has appointed Dr. Tony Frank, the top academic official at Colorado State University, to a new advisory committee that will address the complex issues surrounding access of controlled sensitive technology by foreign nationals within the United States.
As a member of the Deemed Export Advisory Committee, Dr. Frank, Colorado State Provost and Senior Vice President, will help review policy and provide recommendations to the Commerce Department. The committee, which represents views of industry, academia and government, will work to ensure the deemed export licensing policy protects national security as well as the U.S. position as a technology innovator.
Dr. Frank's appointment is for a one-year term. He's one of 12 people on the committee, which includes Norman Augustine, retired chairman and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Corp., and Robert Gates, president of Texas A&M University.
CSU Part of NSF Project to Advance High School Biology and Math Preparation
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2.55 million grant to Rutgers, Colorado State University and two partner institutions to advance high school instruction of biology and mathematics by emphasizing the mathematical methods that underlie modern biology.
The five-year grant, led by Rutgers, includes the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications and the State University of New Jersey. The project aims to close a gap between math and biology instruction in high school courses by creating materials that address mathematical principles of gene mapping, population trends, public health and the spread of diseases, including contemporary threats such as bird flu and bioterrorism.
An important component of the project will be evaluation of the materials. The team will look at student performance and measure how their attitudes change toward biology and mathematics. Dr. Brian Cobb, a Professor of Education at Colorado State University, will be the lead evaluator on the project. Leonard Albright, also a Professor of Education at CSU, will assist Cobb in evaluating the project data.
The NSF grant will fund development of instructional modules that can be used in high school biology and mathematics courses without having to change the curriculum. Teams of teachers, writers and content experts will prepare modules, train teachers to field-test the materials and evaluate the results. The modules will focus on three major themes: computational molecular biology, including human genome sequencing; epidemiology, modeling the spread of a disease and the vaccination and quarantine protocols needed to combat it; and ecology and population biology.
Increasing Diversity in Biomedical Sciences Doctoral Students Aim of Collaboration
Colorado State University's campuses in Pueblo and Fort Collins have partnered to create a new mentorship program to help minority students achieve advanced science degrees at both the masters and doctorate levels. The Bridges to the Doctorate mentoring program will directly address a need to produce a larger pool of qualified minority applicants for doctoral level research programs in biomedical science fields. The program is funded through a three-year, $595,700 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
"With this program, CSU-Pueblo students will gain the expertise and resources that a research university with doctoral-level programs can provide while Fort Collins will be enhanced by our diverse student population," said Colorado State-Pueblo President Joseph Garcia.
CSU-Pueblo has a large ethnic minority population, with 25 percent of the student body being of Hispanic origins, 4 percent African-American and 2 percent Native American. However, relatively few of these students continue beyond baccalaureate training into biomedical science programs. The Bridges to the Doctorate program will recruit under-represented minority students who have the potential to become independent research scientists into the Applied Natural Science masters program at Colorado State-Pueblo.
Faculty from both schools will mentor the students with the goal of providing a successful transition from the master's program in Pueblo to a doctoral program in Fort Collins. Dr. Don Mykles, College of Natural Sciences, is the Bridges to the Doctorate program director at Colorado State University.
