grant – GIS at Bucknell

I posted a few weeks ago about the $520K grant awarded to Bucknell by the Mellon Foundation. Here are some additional details on how the grant money will be used to strengthen environmental studies and GIS integration across the university. From the Library & IT Matters newsletter:

Up to twelve faculty members will receive $400 to participate in either a 4-day (intro) or 2-day (advanced) summer GIS workshop. Click here for more details on the intro and advanced workshops.

Faculty members may submit requests to receive up to $1,000 to revise a course to include GIS ($5,000 total)

Four student researchers will be provided with summer research funding to conduct research projects involving GIS technology

Funds will be available to support consultants and student workers to create new maps or to develop new datasets for use by faculty in integrating GIS for their curriculum and courses

Additionally we have support to help with the acquisition of data which can only be obtained through purchasing data sets or through membership in consortia which provide access to proprietary datasets

Contact me by e-mail at janine.glathar@bucknell.edu or by phone at x. 1990 if you are interested in any of the options listed above.

Notes on two interesting stories about GIS in education. Thanks to Adena Schutzberg’s All Points Blog for the heads up about the stories.

1. Texas State University’s Center for GIScience was recently awarded 500K grant from EPA to use GIS for modelling/mapping air pollution-exposure-health effects:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results (USEPA-STAR) program has awarded a grant of nearly $500,000 to The Texas Center for Geographic Information Science in the Department of Geography at Texas State.

The grant will support a project entitled “Air Pollution-Exposure-Health Effects Indicators: Mining Massive Geographically Referenced Environmental Health Data to Identify Risk Factors for Birth Defects.”The three-year project will develop air pollution exposure assessment methods, visual geospatial data mining tools, and epidemiological analysis procedures to define new air pollution-exposure-health effect indicators that cover three components of the hazards-exposure-health effects-intervention paradigm.

– San Marcos Local News

Click here to see more EPA STAR Research Grant Announcements. The EPA STAR grants are just one of the types of research grants available through the US EPA National Center for Environmental Research. Click here for an overview of the Center’s research and fellowship opportunities. Check the Bucknell GIS Calendar (featured on the main page of the GIS blog) this fall for deadlines for student grant applications for the EPA GRO fellowships – awarded each year to undergraduate students in environmentally related fields of study. From the EPA Fellowships web page:

Eligible students will receive support for their junior and senior years of undergraduate study and for an internship at an EPA facility during the summer between their junior and senior years. The fellowship provides up to $19,700 per year of academic support and up to $9,500 of internship support for the three-month summer period, for a total of up to $48,900 for the two year period.

2. Grad students at Utah State University are collecting high resolution imagery of their campus using a small blimp.

Soaring above the Quad on Tuesday afternoon, a white blimp controlled by Utah State University graduate students was almost hard to spot against the Cache Valley’s overcast sky.The only object that was clearly visible was a black digital camera, snapping one picture every five seconds, providing color georeferenced aerial photography of the entire Quad in UTM (metric) coordinates.

The students were conducting a lab by running a blimp survey for Joseph M. Wheaton’s geographic information systems class. The objective: To provide aerial imagery of the entire Quad. The 1,000-plus pictures the blimp provides them with will be used to make an image that can fit “on top of” the images on Google map, said Bryan Watt, a USU graduate student in the class.

– Herald Journal

Could we do this at Bucknell? Twice in the last month I’ve had faculty (half-jokingly) suggest that we rent a plane to do a data collection fly-over of Lewisburg. Forget the plane, let’s figure out how to get our hands on a blimp!