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Grant Highlights
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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded two grants to the University of Illinois in its second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) competition. Through MATC, the foundation recognizes leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. The two awards were announced in December 2007 at a meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, D.C. One of the $50,000 grants was awarded to the Firefox Accessibility Extension project, a program designed to extend the features of the Firefox web browser in supporting people with disabilities as well as in assisting web developers in evaluating accessibility features of their website. Jon Gunderson, Applied Health Sciences, is the project director. A second $50,000 award went to the OpenEAI Project, an open-source venture dedicated to discovering and documenting the dynamics, principles and practices of enterprise application integration. Douglas Vinzant, Senior Associate Vice President for Planning and Administration, accepted the award on behalf of the University. Funds from this award will support graduate fellowships in the Integration Competency Center of the Administrative IT Services Department. For more information about these awards, please visit the following links: Firefox Accessibilty Extension: OpenEAI Project:
Grand Victoria Foundation has awarded a two-year, $200,000 grant to the University of Illinois to support Illinois Promise scholarships. Launched in 2005 by Chancellor Richard Herman, the Illinois Promise program is designed to help make a University of Illinois education affordable for economically disadvantaged students in the state who qualify for admission. Specifically, Illinois Promise awards cover the difference between a student’s financial aid package and the actual cost of an Illinois education, including tuition, fees, room and board, and books and supplies. The goal of the program is to enable students with severe financial need to attend the UI without incurring significant debt. Similar programs, like the Carolina Covenant at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, have demonstrated that students who do not need to worry about paying back substantial student loans or working full time to make ends meet are more successful in their studies. All funding for the Illinois Promise program comes from private gifts and grants. The grant from Grand Victoria Foundation will provide Illinois Promise scholarships to 33 Illinois students in 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Grand Victoria Foundation provides strategic funding to Illinois organizations working for lasting economic, educational and environmental change. Since it was established in 1996 by the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, Illinois, the Foundation has provided more than $90 million in grants to help communities across the state become vibrant places to live and work. Through grantmaking and leadership initiatives, Grand Victoria Foundation supports five elements of great communities: good jobs, a healthy environment, great places for kids, capable organizations and homegrown philanthropy. The Foundation has offices in Chicago and Elgin. For more information, please visit www.grandvictoriafdn.org or call 312.609.0200. For more information about the Illinois Promise program, please visit the web site: http://www.osfa.uiuc.edu/aid/promise.html
The Lumina Foundation for Education has awarded the College Of Education with an $899,000 grant for a project that will enable greater numbers of Illinois community college students, particularly those from underrepresented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to earn baccalaureate degrees at four-year institutions. Taking advantage of the state’s well-developed community college network, the University of Illinois will develop strategic partnerships with targeted community colleges to establish and model the Transfer Experience and Advising Mentors (TEAM) program. TEAM is designed to advance access and success in postsecondary education by providing the information, individual counseling, and hands-on assistance with the transfer process that many students need to achieve their educational goals. In addition, the project will offer online bridge coursework and a dedicated academic adviser to facilitate access to and attainment of an Illinois education. On a national scale, the project will also promote access and success in postsecondary education by developing model programs and approaches to removing barriers that can be replicated by peer public research institutions. Press release: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/07/1023TEAM.html
In early 2007, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) with two technology grants for projects that build on different aspects of GSLIS’ extensive work on the use of digital libraries in scholarly communication. Both multi-institutional projects, which received a total of $2.2 million from the Mellon Foundation, include research teams from several other universities and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), based in Illinois. Professor John Unsworth, Dean of GSLIS, will lead the “Metadata Offer New Knowledge” (MONK) project, which extends work previously funded by the Mellon Foundation both at Illinois and at Northwestern University. The project attempts to facilitate scholarly analysis of literary texts using digitized libraries and data mining techniques. By creating an extensive testbed of digitized materials, as well as a common environment and appropriate tools for scholars, the MONK project is expected to lead not only to new techniques for textual analysis but may also foster new forms of research. The second project, called SEASR, or Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, is led by Professor Michael Welge of NCSA, with Professor Unsworth serving as one of the co-principal investigators. SEASR focuses on developing, integrating, deploying, and sustaining a set of reusable and expandable software components and a supporting framework, SEASR, which will benefit a broad set of data mining applications for scholars in humanities. Two important benefits from the development of SEASR will be the creation of a vibrant digital humanities community and technology transfer between diverse disciplines that traditionally have had little interaction. Press release: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/NEWS/07/0509digitalgrants.html
Sloan Fellowship awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. The Sloan Fellowship awards are highly competitive, involving nominations from the very best scientists of this generation from the United States and Canada. A total of 118 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Fellowships are awarded for a two-year period and are used by the Fellow for such purposes as equipment, technical assistance, professional travel, trainee support, or any other activity directly related to the Fellow's research. Three Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships of $45,000 each were awarded to the following Illinois faculty in 2007:
Press release: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/ii/07/0405/ach.html
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign contains at least 70,000 items that have been mostly inaccessible to the outside world. Thanks to a $604,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the University is undertaking a project, to be led by Rare Book head Valerie Hotchkiss, to catalogue these largely hidden items that represent nearly a quarter of the Library’s total collection. The planned project, named "An Embarrassment of Riches," aims to make every book in the collection accessible via the University's online catalog. According to Hotchkiss, the collection is one of the largest and most remarkable in the country. The collection includes the third-largest University collection of 15th century books, including a large portion of an original Gutenberg Bible.
Professors Richard Layton (Religious Studies) and Walter Feinberg (Educational Policy Studies) received $193,000 in support from the Spencer Foundation for their project, "Current Initiatives to Teach Courses on Religion in Public Schools: Visions of American Citizenship Education." The project undertakes a detailed study of courses on religion currently implemented in public schools. Layton and Feinberg will 1) inventory state initiatives to introduce courses on religion and Bible into the public schools; 2) describe, compare and analyze the expressed aims of such courses; 3) describe the conduct of instruction in sample schools; 4) explore the potential educational advantages and disadvantages of such courses in relation to the norms of citizenship development in liberal pluralism; 5) provide guidelines useable by school boards, administrators and teachers considering such courses. |
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