Message from the Chancellor

Chancellor's Note

September, 2008

Fall always is a special time of year on college campuses. All the students and faculty have returned from vacations, refreshed and and ready to get to work. Dining and residence halls bustle with new students excited about their first year of college while football stadiums fill with the roar of thousands of fans. The excitement of another year is pleasantly contagious.

As you may know, this is not just another fall semester for me. This is my first semester as chancellor of the University of Arkansas, and thus has been most memorable. In the coming months and years I hope to roll out a number of new initiatives. But perhaps the most important change I hope to make is a philosophical adjustment. As an institution, I want to be more mindful of our students' needs, and reorient our focus to serving them as best we can. In short, I want to put students first.

There are a number of ways to do this, but giving them a quality education surely is at the top. Components of a quality education include participating in challenging coursework and having quality interaction with faculty. Active and collaborative learning experiences also are vital to keeping students engaged. Something that combines these elements is the ability to conduct research. Often, undergraduate students don't have the opportunity to conduct meaningful research, but at the University of Arkansas our students are taking advantage of some unique opportunities.

In this issue, you'll read about one way students are involved in meaningful research by designing simple prosthetics for patients in the Dominican Republic. This is a tremendous opportunity for biological engineering students to not only get real world experience, but to make a difference in the lives of people.

Other students in the biological and agricultural engineering program spent the summer building and studying a 300-foot long, one-foot-wide artificial stream designed to grow algae as a biofuel. Part of a three-year research grant funded by the National Science Foundation, this is just one of four projects focusing on sustainable ecosystem design and management. The aim of the research is to see if Arkansas can produce high yields of algae year-round, and bring us that much closer to creating more sustainable fuel sources. Hopefully, they will have some answers in the next couple years.

In another project last spring and summer, 40 university students and six high school students from the Environmental and Spatial Technology Initiative worked with professors to create a virtual hospital and supply chain in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world online. The project was designed to study ways to make healthcare more cost efficient and effective, and incorporated location aware systems, sensors, smart devices and radio-frequency identification systems.

The project required students to visit local hospitals to better understand how they work, and then challenged them to imagine ways in which they could be improved. This included designing 'smart' pill bottles that can remember their pill count and that only the owner can open, smart shelves that know when to reorder, a restocking robot and virtual RFID readers and tags.

The multidisciplinary project bridged colleges and departments, pulling together ideas and participants from the colleges of business, engineering, education and the arts and sciences. No, it's not the real world yet, but this kind of research may have a significant say in determining what the real world will be.

The projects detailed above provide the kind of interdisciplinary, collaborative and challenging training students need to be successful in the modern workplace. As we strive to create a more student-centered campus environment, providing our students with meaningful research opportunities will be an ongoing priority - and point of pride.

That's just one way we're putting students first at the University of Arkansas.

Thanks for your support,

G. David Gearhart
Chancellor