Issue date: 2/6/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Justin Steyer Western professor David Patrick watches Western junior Rachel Adams use a microscope for a research project funded by grant money. [Click to enlarge]

Western faculty members have been awarded close to $40 million to fund individual research projects over the last few years.

Western professor David Patrick is working on liquid crystal imprinting, a form of nano-technology that is not completely understood - even by those most familiar with it.

In an effort to learn more about this form of imprinting, the National Science Foundation has given Patrick $728,000 to fund the research project. $500,000 was awarded to the project in 2000. The remaining $228,000 was granted in September 2006.

Patrick is one of many Western faculty members who use grant money to fund his or her research. The list of projects varies from the $186,340 awarded to biologists trying to determine a link between climate and planktonic food webs to the $60,000 being used by mathematicians examining inverse problems in transportation theory.

A small portion of these funds come from individual donors, but they are primarily generated from both local and national foundations and institutes, Director of Research and Sponsored Programs Geri Walker said. Her office helps Western professors find money and monitors all money awarded to faculty.

Walker said although this amount is significantly less than the hundreds of millions of dollars research-oriented universities, such as the University of Washington receive, the amount is comparable to non-research orientated institutions such as Western.

"Just because we're a small institution doesn't mean we don't have good people," Walker said.

Walker said one of the biggest benefits to Western students is that undergraduates are far more likely to participate in research at Western than their counterparts at UW. At many universities, undergraduates have to compete with graduate students pursuing doctoral and masters degrees.

For his liquid crystal imprinting project, Patrick has enlisted the help of five undergraduates to explore the fundamental principles of molecular crystalline behavior.

Nick Gislason has worked on the project for three years, since he was a sophomore, and has been doing research that graduate students would be doing at other institutions.

Patrick, Gislason and their colleagues are working in a new field of science that is not clearly understood. For instance, the Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM) they use to detect individual molecules had to be built by the students.

The STM uses a needle that tapers to a point the width of a single atom, one box suspended the needle unit by springs, while the other used what looked like climbing cord.

A complete list of reseach projects funded by grants at Western is available on Western's Research and Sponsored Programs Web site.

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