This award supports the renewal of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site at Ohio Wesleyan University. Each undergraduate participant will work on a ten-week research project under the guidance of an Ohio Wesleyan University faculty member in one of the following disciplines: astronomy, computer science, mathematics/statistics, neuroscience, and physics. Project participants will represent a wide range of interests, experiences, and backgrounds. The projects will focus on one or more aspects of scientific computation, such as: numerical (coding in a "traditional" programming language), symbolic (using a computer algebra program such as Mathematica®), and data visualization. Seven to eight mentors from the fields listed above will guide student explorations into a wide range of important scientific problems. Weekly meetings, in which individual research groups give progress reports and all participants are able to discuss the projects, will foster a sense of community among the participants and point out the strengths of computational techniques to tackle problems in varying disciplines. A parallel computing cluster, owned by the university, will be available for participants to use on their projects. A series of weekly, half-hour, faculty-led seminars will introduce participants to widely used computational tools. A research symposium will be held at the end of the research period for participants to present their results. This award is funded by the Physics Division and the Division of Mathematical Sciences within the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.
