Oct 31, 2007 - Claremont, Calif. - Professor of Mathematics Francis Su recently received a research grant of $114,468 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the support of the project entitled “Combinatorial fixed point theorems, polytopes, and preference sets.”

The grant is for three years beginning August 1, 2007, and pushes the value of grants recently reported by the HMC Department of Mathematics past the $1 million mark. Su’s research continues the line of work begun in his prior NSF grant from 2003-2007, in which methods from combinatorics, topology and geometry are used to study problems in mathematical economics and the social sciences; in particular, problems related to voting and fair allocation.

Su also gave an invited plenary talk at 2007 MathFest, the national summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held this year in San Jose, Calif. His talk was the featured MAA Student Lecture, which is open to all participants, but is aimed at students. Titled “Splitting the Rent: Fairness Problems, Fixed Points, and Fragmented Polytopes,” his talk featured the work of Elisha Peterson ‘00. This marks the third invited address Su has given in the last two years at a national MAA meeting. At last year’s MathFest he gave the James R.C. Leitzel Lecture, in which he spoke about doing research with undergraduates.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Adam Johnson is one of the co-principal investigators for an NSF grant titled “IONiC: A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education,” it was also announced recently.

The grant was awarded as part of the NSF’s Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement program and seeks to break down the barriers for curricular innovation in inorganic chemistry, where faculty often have diverse teaching loads and deep, yet narrow, training within a subdiscipline.

Intellectual Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC) is designed to enhance the inorganic chemistry classroom and laboratory experience for students and faculty members through the development and growth of a vibrant virtual “community of practice.” The community’s foundation will be a cyber-interface that facilitates collaborative development of learning materials and their dissemination to the wider inorganic community. The website Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource (VIPEr) will serve both as a repository and as a user-friendly platform for social networking tools that facilitate virtual collaboration and community building.

The program will create new learning materials, develop faculty expertise, implement educational innovations in the classroom and assess student achievement. This project has great potential for broader impacts in the community of inorganic chemistry educators, through the growth of this community of practice, and the dissemination of new learning materials via VIPEr and the National Science Digital Library. The evolution of IONiC and the unique blend of virtual and face-to-face networking it provides will serve as a model for other disciplines and groups of educators with similar goals who face similar challenges.