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NEWS RELEASE

04-27-01

Contacts:
Dean Isaacson, Statistics, (515) 294-3440
Mark Kaiser, Statistics (515) 294-8871
Dave Gieseke, Liberal Arts & Sciences Public Relations, (515) 294-7742
Steve Sullivan, News Service, (515) 294-3720

NSF AWARDS IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY STATISTICS DEPARTMENT
$2.2M GRANT

AMES, Iowa -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Iowa State University's statistics department a five-year $2.2 million grant that will provide research opportunities for students and faculty.

The Vertical Integration of Research and Education (VIGRE) grant will benefit undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and increase interdisciplinary research opportunities for faculty. The research projects supported by the VIGRE grant will involve statistics, mathematics and the applied sciences.

"The VIGRE program is designed to benefit the mathematical sciences by bringing together working groups consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty," said Dean Isaacson, professor and head of the statistics department. "We're not only looking for individuals trained solely in statistics. I hope we can find postdocs and graduate students who have substantial quantitative backgrounds, but who also are interested in agronomy, animal science, ecology, sociology, engineering, computer science, mathematics, psychology, genetics -- any number of academic disciplines."

The structure of the program will provide graduate students the opportunity to incorporate research and interdisciplinary problem solving into their educational experience at an early stage. Undergraduate students will be on the Iowa State campus during the summer months and assigned to an ongoing research group. Students will spend the first week of the eight-week program interacting with their working group before working on a research project for the next five weeks. The final weeks will be used to prepare a paper, which will be presented at a conference for VIGRE participants.

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