The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and Philander Smith College has formed the Arkansas Cyberinfrastructure Minority Training, Education Consortium (AMC-TEC) to develop a unique interdisciplinary cyberinfrastructure (CI) educational community within Arkansas. This consortium is educating a majority minority student population, and faculty in cyberinfrastructure-oriented concepts, theories, practices, and principles within Science Technology, Mathematics, and Engineering (STEM) at the teaching-oriented Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the area of the project. This is a demonstration project focused on developing the capacity of the participant institutions within three core areas as they relate to cyberinfrastructure resources, (1) institutional faculty development (2) tangible cyber-based student activities (3) CI curriculum enhancement. These activities are producing strategies that can be deployed on a national scale to institutionalize a renaissance in STEM education at student-focused universities, through the sharing of resources and expertise to transform STEM education and research through the introduction of cyberinfrastructure resources. The project is creating new local, national partnerships to enable the sharing of pedagogical models, best practices, and curricula to achieve maximum regional and rapid national impact. Distinct partnerships between the listed HBCUs, the University of Arkansas (UARK) High Performance Computing Center, Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON), the Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) at the University of Oklahoma (OU), the Shoder Education Foundation, and the Minority Serving Institutions-Cyberinfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC) have been formed. The partners are providing resources, expertise, and support services, that did not previously exist at the HBCUs campuses.
Intellectual Merit This project is creating a community of learners composed of a majority minority student population, and STEM faculty to address the national challenge of engaging an underrepresented population within STEM to utilize cyberinfrastructure research, and educational resources. The magnitude of the challenge that the U.S. faces with respect to ensuring that it retains its intellectual capacity within STEM research and innovation through the production of a workforce that is capable of serious science using both local, national and international cyberinfrastructure resources requires all capable individuals within STEM to take an active role in the intellectual discourse. The proposed project offers a replicable approach to increasing the participation of historically underrepresented communities and regions within Cyberinfrastructure oriented research and education. The project achieves these goals by partnering mature cyberinfrastructure communities, local resources to inject cyberinfrastructureoriented materials into existing curriculum and to expand the expertise of faculty with practical skills at HBCUs in Arkansas.
Broader Impacts The broader impacts of this project include:(1) new collaborations to expand the workforce within the domains of cyberinfrastructure research and education to include greater numbers of historically underrepresented minorities, and women, (2) developing avenues for sharing knowledge and resources as innovation takes place within the domains of cyberinfrastructure research, and education (3) expanding the diversity of faculty members engaged in cyberinfrastructure-oriented research and teaching. (4) Increasing the enrollment of students interested in cyberinfrastructure-oriented careers within STEM particularly within the computing fields.
project outcomes at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), Philander Smith College (PSC) includes the implementation of new curriculum in undergraduate cyberinfrastructure-oriented topics on both campuses in bioinformatics, digital humanities, computational science areas such as computational chemistry, and computational physics. These undergraduate courses led to the development of complementary graduate courses at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, for a new Master’s degree in Computer Science & Technology. An additional project outcome was the development of a unique summer bootcamp in supercomputing hosted at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (UAF) supercomputing center. The summer camp exposed minority undergraduate students to unique elements of constructing small-scale clusters, and the implementation of requisite software on such systems. A significant project outcome at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff was the funding of a Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant award for 2012 from the Army Research Office (ARO). The DURIP program is highly competitive; the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff was one of only two schools in the state of Arkansas to receive funding under this program in 2012. The funding will enable the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff to purchase a high-performance/ visualization cluster for the campus to support research activities. The project also, includes funding for the construction of a visualization wall for 3D rendering.
