The UT Environmental Science Institute will expand its lecture series thanks to a $1.52 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The grant, awarded in May 2002, will fund a three-year project and provide support for nine graduate fellows and four undergraduate fellows each year to serve as resources for kindergarten to 12th-grade science and math teachers.
"We're really tearing down that wall between academia and the community," said Bruce Hall, an organizer for the program. "That line needs to be blurred, so UT is offering its wonderful resources to public schools around Texas."
The program will build on existing outreach activities involving UT and the Texas public school system, Hall said, including programs within the Marine Science Institute, the UT Institute for Geophysics and the Environmental Science Institute.
The grant will allow the institute, an interdisciplinary program of environmental research, to expand already existing programs.
"The outreach lecture series started in November of 1999," said Jay Banner, the institute's director. "The whole point of it is to target the public in general and then, more specifically, K-12 science teachers. The lecturers we have in this program are award-winning UT faculty and cutting-edge researchers, so we're hoping that by using the great faculty we have at the University we can improve and enrich science education throughout elementary, middle and high school."
The monthly Friday night lectures have all garnered great support, with crowds of 200 to 600 people at each lecture, Banner said. Teachers who attend lectures receive a CD-ROM of material covered in the lecture, which they can use in their own classrooms.
With the additional funding available, the institute now will hold workshops in conjunction with the lectures.
"These workshops will allow us to further reach the public. We're taking UT graduate students and connecting them with K-12 science teachers, who will help them to develop their own classroom activities."
The first workshop was held Friday.
"It was really a great success," Hall said. "The people there were excited and eager to learn."
Brent Iverson, a UT chemistry professor, presented the 19th outreach lecture Friday on bioterrorism. He said that if it weren't for the program, the public would have little knowledge about all the great research going on at the University.
"There's a certain responsibility to relay these ideas to the public," he said. "And we can't do that without someone who organizes a way to disseminate the information."
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