The 2005 Faculty Global Grant Competition is currently underway. The application deadline is Friday, February 25, 2005. Applications in pdf format are available here.

Building on the success of President Reid’s previous faculty grant competitions for international research and curriculum development, Wayne State University awarded another 20 Presidential Global Grants to faculty in December 2002. As a result, Wayne State professors are currently engaged in a variety of important new initiatives across the curriculum and around the globe for 2003. This is a sampling of those initiatives. Information on 2004 grant recipient projects will be available shortly.

Through federal legislative efforts and strong self-advocacy initiatives, students with disabilities are attending post-secondary education at unprecedented rates. But even with these campus-based programs, very few students with disabilities have had the opportunity to take part in international study programs.

The Developmental Disabilities Institute (DDI) is now undertaking a pilot project to design an international exchange program for undergraduate students with disabilities at Wayne State University (WSU). This exchange program takes place at the Abbey of Pontlevoy in France’s Loire Valley. The Abbey was developed in alliance with the Eur-Am Center for International Education by the University of Southern Mississippi and consortium partners in the US (of which WSU is one) and Europe.

There are approximately 800 students who have disabilities at WSU including those with psychological disabilities, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities, visual impairments, hearing impairments, and language impairments. DDI is partnering with Educational Accessibility Services (EAS), WSU’s office for students with disabilities. EAS’s purpose is to provide students with the resources they need to succeed and to support their participation in all WSU programs and activities with dignity and independence. EAS is partnering with DDI to develop the curriculum, suggest adaptations to improve accessibility, and to develop and disseminate materials to inform and encourage WSU students with disabilities to participate in the exchange program.
DDI is also connecting with Mobility International USA, a national, non-profit organization with the following mission: to empower people with disabilities around the world through international exchange, information, technical assistance and training; and to ensure the inclusion of people with disabilities in international exchange and development programs.

As a result of participating in the program, students will have increased knowledge about other cultures, cross-cultural disability issues, worldview perspectives, increased job skills (interpersonal skills, flexibility, adaptability), independent thinking, leadership skills, a more open and accepting attitude towards cultural and diversity issues; students will have an increased interest in local and global community involvement, increased self-awareness and direction; and a sense of accomplishment by achieving a goal.

A long standing collaboration between the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and Wayne State University (WSU) has been extended recently to the study of ultra high energy collisions of heavy nuclei at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. These collisions provide the unique opportunity to study strongly interacting matter at temperatures and densities that have not existed since the first few micro seconds after the Big Bang.

The principle investigators at the University of Sao Paulo and Wayne State have collaborated continuously in basic nuclear research for nearly 25 years. As members of the STAR experiment, both the WSU and the USP groups have had a long history of contributing to student training through a particularly strong focus on instrumentation, scientific infrastructure, and physics analysis. The University of Sao Paulo is the largest research university in Brazil and the Institute of Physics is home to the Department of Nuclear Physics which houses approximately 30 nuclear physics faculty, 20 post doctoral research associates, 30 PhD students and 50 undergraduates. Many students who have completed their PhD training at Wayne State also completed their undergraduate work at the University of Sao Paulo.

The WSU/USP collaboration has made it possible for WSU to play a central role in the training. It is clearly of significant benefit to both teaching and research in nuclear physics at WSU to continue to strengthen this collaboration. The purpose of these visits will be to more directly expose WSU students and postdoctoral research associates to ongoing scientific activities in Brazil and provide and opportunity for closer interactions between Brazilian teaching faculty, and their students resident at WSU.

This exchange program will strengthen the existing USP/WSU collaboration in nuclear physics. It will provide an opportunity for WSU students to appreciate the global reach of their academic pursuits in nuclear physics and give them first hand experience with collaborating in cutting edge scientific research across international boundaries
During the first year of the program we will bring three members of the USP faculty to WSU for two weeks each. Alex Szanto de Toledo, Marcelo Munhoz and Jun Takahashi will each visit and deliver a series of seminars for undergraduates and graduate students on mutually agreeable topics.

The purpose of this program is to establish a formal scholar exchange relationship with Tsinghua University in China and strengthen our ongoing ties to European automotive research centers.

Our engineering program has had a significant stream of graduate students coming from China and Tsinghua University every year. The National ASE Laboratory was recently founded in Tsinghua University to focus on the safety and emissions technology related to the Chinese automotive market, which is expected to be the largest in the world within the next decade.

This is a first time ever that Ferrari SPA (the world famous Formula One racing team) funded a US university to do research on their highly competitive and confidential racing car technology. The research program will involve both graduate [and] undergraduate students in experiments using our state-of-the-art Spray and Combustion Laser Diagnostics Laboratory. It will also offer us a rare chance to jump-start the Student Formula One national competition program sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers, from which WSU has been absent.

The outcome of this project will contribute to:

• the seminar and teaching program as evidenced by the participation of European and Chinese exchange scholars at WSU in the powertrain research areas.
• campus outreach and enrich student learning experience by the feedback of students visiting Europe research centers via the publication of his/her article in a campus publication.
• recruitment of highly qualified international students.
• joint publications of WSU graduate students and faculty members with European and Chinese researchers.

South Africa
Numeracy Development with Integrated Epidemiology, Biostatics and Foundational Mathematics Instruction
- Daniel Barth-Jones, Assistant Professor, Center for Healthcare Effectiveness
Research

President Reid initiated a collaborative partnership between WSU and the University of Pretoria School of Health Systems and Public Health. Following his visit to Pretoria, a WSU Public Health/International Task Force was convened with representatives from several schools, colleges and institutes at Wayne State. This task force conducted a Needs Assessment study for the initiative and developed a conceptual model for a “Virtual Program in Public Health” entailing distance learning as an important component.

This project will enhance the education of students at the University of Pretoria and at Wayne State University in three very important ways:

1. Dr. Barth-Jones is an expert in mathematical modeling and computer simulation of infectious diseases, who specializes in research on HIV infection and HIV vaccines. Because as much as 25 percent of the population in South Africa may be HIV infected, the opportunity to provide instruction in the epidemiological modeling of HIV vaccine effects (and other infectious disease modeling) is extremely timely for students and faculty at the University of Pretoria.

2. As anticipated, this faculty exchange is resulting in a number of opportunities for curriculum globalization both at WSU and at the University of Pretoria, especially for a medical and public health curriculum regarding the global HIV pandemic.

3. Increased emphasis on understanding mathematical concepts, and developing computational, and problem-solving skills benefit students with a broad range of mathematical training backgrounds.

This project started out by bringing Professor Antônio Ferreira da Silva Neto, Director of the College of Industrial Design of the State University of Bahia (UNEB) and an established Brazilian designer and photographer, to Wayne State for 3 weeks in February 2003.

The purpose of the program is to enrich the educational experience and international awareness of students in the fine arts and strengthen relationships already in place between Wayne State University and the State University of Bahia in Salvador Brazil. These goals were facilitated through:

- A photography exhibition of Dr. Neto’s most important work.
- Public lectures by Dr. Neto on the African Brazilian culture of Bahia.
- A photography workshop focusing on the streets and culture of Detroit. This consisted of a photo workshop by Dr. Neto to a group of WSU photography students using the streets and neighborhoods of Detroit as the focus of the investigation.
- Exploration of future faculty and Student Exchanges between WSU and UNEB.

In 1997, the WSU’s Community Arts Gallery hosted the popular exhibition O Pelouinho! Popular Art from the Historic Heart of Brazil; in 2000, Wayne State collaborated with UNEB and two other Brazilian universities to host the International Conference on the Influences of Africa in the Visual Arts of the Americas in Salvador, Bahia. The conference in Brazil was attended by faculty and students from Wayne State and neighboring institutions (College of Creative Studies, University of Michigan, University of Detroit-Mercy, Marygrove, Washtenaw Community College) who were invited to attend Professor Neto’s lectures and to view his exhibition.

This project has added to the momentum and visibility Wayne State University already enjoys for its efforts relating to the African Diaspora in Brazil.

Germany/Russia/US
Mathematical Modeling of Aging: An International Teaching and Research Effort
- Robert Arking, PhD, Biological Sciences

This purpose of this project is to enhance student and faculty understanding of cutting edge research in the field of mathematical modeling of the aging process. This expertise will arrive in the person of an internationally known demographer and mathematician.

Professor Vasillij N. Novoseltsev is a Research Scientist at the world reknown Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research (Ronstock, Germany) and a section chief at the Institute of Control Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia).
The object of his visit is two-fold. First, Prof. Novoseltsev will share his knowledge on the first topic with us in the form of a four lecture mini-course entitled, “Mathematical Modeling and Simulation in Aging Studies”. This course will likely attract students and faculty from Biological Sciences, Institute of Gerontology, Mathematics, and Sociology. In addition, Prof. Novoseltsev will present one overview lecture entitled, “New Information Technologies: Mathematical Modeling in Biology and Medicine” which will likely attract

These five lectures, given over a space of a one month visit, most likely in April 2003, will provide our students and faculty with an introduction into mathematical protocols not widely used in many disciplines but which are of increasing importance in allowing the better understanding of complex phenotypes such as aging. His visit will provide an intellectual stimulation to the WSU community, and foster by example the mission laid out by President Reid that the education our students receive at Wayne State should enable them to be better able to function in an increasingly interconnected world.

The second goal will be to continue our collaborative research efforts which have resulted in three recent scholarly publications in respected peer-reviewed journals. These papers reported the results of Prof. Novoseltsev’s mathematical modeling of the data which Prof. Arking obtained from his long term experiments involving the artificial selection of long-lived Drosphila (i.e., fruit files – the geneticist’s favorite organism). This collaborative effort has enabled us to better understand the evolutionary mechanisms underlying the aging process. The visit will allow the professors to spend some time examining the raw data and discussing at length various proposals for their analysis. Another benefit of the proposed visit is that Prof. Novoseltsev and Prof. Arking are planning to submit a joint research proposal to the CRDF 2003 Cooperative Grants Program. They will be much more likely to write a successful proposal if they can discuss the project face to face.

Prof. Novoseltsev’s lectures will provide our students and colleagues with an integrated mathematical and biological approach to the demography of aging. This mathematical approach to social and biological topics is turning out to be of great importance in allowing us to detect and measure the effects of the aging revolution on our society. Although bits and pieces of modern demography are done on campus, these lectures will present our students with an integrated account of what modern demography can do, as well as educating our students in the knowledge and skills necessary to understand this topic. It is very likely that the aging revolution will significantly alter Western society in this century and will likely be one of the processes driving the “rapidly changing global environment” mentioned by President Reid. Our students can learn about this first hand from an international expert in the field.