An award is made to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) to strengthen its active faculty scholarship, experiential graduate and undergraduate student research opportunities, and involvement in community outreach through the acquisition of controlled-environment growth chambers. This instrumentation will enhance existing research and teaching/training agendas with shared focus on global change biology that require precise control of atmospheric carbon dioxide, light intensity, photoperiod, relative humidity, and/or temperature, which is currently not possible with existing resources at UTC. Five faculty members of the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences will conduct research projects with their students to investigate the potential impacts of climate change on species' range migrations, community dynamics, evolutionary processes, and carbon cycling via experiments involving plant, animal, and microbial systems. An additional faculty colleague from the Department of Chemistry and her students will utilize the instrumentation to isolate the effects of heavy metal accumulation in plants. The acquisition will is new instrumentation also will allow faculty to develop new lines of research and increase their research funding capacity.
Student enrollment in the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at UTC has increased by more than 40% during the past five years and continues to steadily increase. Within this growing department, the new instrumentation will increase research productivity by enabling faculty to effectively integrate more research into their sizeable teaching duties and conduct year-round campus-based research. Close research training relationships will be fostered through student participation in faculty-directed research activities. Research training also will expand to the many students enrolled in upper-level courses at UTC that include experiential learning through inquiry-based hypothesis- driven research. Because more than 55% UTC students are women and nearly 20% represent racial or ethnic minorities, participation of these students in research will inherently be broadened by teaching applications of the chambers. The PI and co-PIs also are committed to the active recruitment of students from underrepresented groups to participate in their research activities. Beyond campus, the growth chambers will be utilized in new learning modules based on faculty research activities to be developed for local K-12 outreach organizations and schools, especially those that affect underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Through the applicability of faculty research and teaching/training activities to their interests, the growth chambers also will enhance community and regional research collaborations with the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee Army National Guard, Tennessee Division of Forestry, Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, and United States Fish and Wildlife Service.