I have often used this space to talk about new undergraduate curricular initiatives, such as the introduction of Arabic or Portuguese, the proposed new minor in Dance or Board of Trustee approval of the new BA in Engineering, or to share my excitement about new faculty (profiles of new faculty arriving in fall can be found here). I have received quite a bit of feedback from parents, alumni, and friends that they enjoy learning about how the College of Arts and Sciences is growing and changing in the CAS E-News. I've also learned that parents, especially, love any focus on students and are delighted that we now include the names of students on the Dean's List. We also provide links that people enjoy to departmental newsletters: alumni delight in knowing what their former professors are up to and recalling their interactions with them, whether those memories elicit images of bête noire or cuddle bear faculty members, lessons painfully learned or hilarious incidents. With this issue, however, I would like to shift focus a bit, while, I hope, retaining the elements of this communication that have proved of such high interest to you in the past. I would like to focus on the role of faculty and students in the creation of new knowledge, that is, on scholarship.
The faculty role in the College is uniquely captured by the phrase "teacher-scholar." Another way of saying what I just have in the first paragraph of this communication is that in past E-News issues we have tended to emphasize the first part of this integrated role, the one that we think of as the CAS hallmark, faculty teaching and student learning. In this issue and subsequent ones, I would like to add a focus on the second half, on the scholarship that makes the College the lively, cutting-edge research enterprise that it is. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate just how intimately tied to the quality and currency of what happens in the classroom, faculty and student scholarly activities are. The plan is to profile faculty and student research and scholarly accomplishment in particular areas of the College, beginning with the natural sciences.
In this issue we highlight the Department of Biology. The faculty members in the Department of Biology are astonishingly active researchers, many of whom have international reputations in their areas of specialization. The expertise of the Biology Department's faculty falls into two general research clusters: 1) neuroscience and muscle biology as subspecialties of general cell biology, and 2) ecology, evolution, and systematics. The Biology Department within the College of Arts and Sciences has a clearly defined vision of where it wants to make its mark; how careful hiring, faculty development, and student mentoring will allow it to do so in its signature areas of excellence; and how the Department mission and vision support that of the University of Vermont generally.
The faculty and administration of the University of Vermont have determined that the institution will move to strengthen its claim to national repute in three areas: the environment, health, and liberal education. Even in the very challenging climate for federal funding of research the basic sciences have experienced in recent years, the members of the Biology faculty are very well funded by grants from the NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA and other governmental and non-governmental agencies. As a result, graduate students are mentored by world-class scientists and Post-docs, among integrated research groups that include more than 50 UVM undergraduate students per year. These teams often work in collaboration with other CAS and UVM units, produce a stunning number of scientific papers and conference presentations annually in the most prestigious scientific outlets. Much of the funding in the Department comes specifically from the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) of NSF. DEB is, by virtue of its title as well as its mandate, dedicated to environmental biology. Thus, the Biology Department represents one of the strongholds in advancing university-wide expertise in this area. Likewise, those doing research in cell biology are well funded through NIH and produce work that has as direct an impact on people's health as well as the environment. Moreover, it goes without saying that a general and current knowledge of natural science is a sine qua non of a liberal education. The Department of Biology plays a critical role in this last area not only because it trains so many majors and minors in an array of degree programs, but also because such a large number of UVM students take courses in biology to satisfy a personal interest, a program requirement, for example, in a health-related pre-professional program, or to fulfill the CAS requirement that mandates a lab science course.
I invite you to learn more about the Department of Biology, its faculty and students by reading through the profiles that appear in this issue, but also by visiting the Department's website (http://www.uvm.edu/~biology/). Next CAS E-News Departmental Research Profile: Chemistry.
