![[Dr. Frank Collins]](as1.gif.html)
"Faculty members have an impressive rate of success in their efforts to obtain competitive funding from federal, state, and private sources for their research and creative activities in addition to their involvement in the undergraduate teaching program."
Offering a variety of subjects ranging from fine arts to the physical, mathematical, biological, and social sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences is OSU's largest academic unit with 24 departments and schools.The faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences are active participants in academic endeavors. Faculty members have an impressive rate of success in their efforts to obtain competitive funding from federal, state, and private sources for their research and creative activities, in addition to their involvement in the undergraduate teaching program. Arts and Sciences faculty attracted more than $9.6 million in external grant support this year. On the average, there is nearly one grant per faculty member in the college. Every faculty member makes approximately five presentations to local, regional, national, and/or international audiences each year. Each member of the Arts and Sciences faculty publishes about 1.5 articles per year in a wide variety of journals. Nearly one of every four members of the faculty were honored by professional organizations last year, and almost every faculty member is a major advisor for someone who is working on a dissertation or thesis.
Although about half of the faculty members work as individual investigators on funded projects, many others perform research without the benefit of grant support. Research funds attracted to the college have made possible the purchase of sophisticated multi-user instruments for use in both research and instruction and has funded conferences on campus in a wide variety of disciplines. In addition, these funds have allowed faculty to perform research in laboratories and libraries on six continents, and have brought outstanding researchers from around the world to OSU for visits to collaborate on a variety of projects.
The Gardiner Art Gallery, a division of the Department of Art, received funding to repair a kinetic sculpture by recently deceased Professor Emeritus Dale McKinney for a major retrospective of the artist's work. The exhibit was presented not only on campus, but also traveled to both Oklahoma City and Tulsa. A member of the faculty of the Art Department received funds to complete research for a book on women artists in India. The research involved traveling to small towns in India to interview living artists and photograph their work.
The Department of Botany houses an ongoing program which uses the plant Arabidopsis thaliana to study genetic control of embryo development in higher plants. The laboratory has an active role in the international effort to utilize Arabidopsis as a model system for basic research in plant molecular biology. Another member of the Botany faculty is in the process of conducting flora surveys of various areas in the state. These inventories of terrestrial and aquatic vascular plants are essential in the development of reasonable conservation plans for this area. In addition to producing the inventories, herbarium voucher specimens documenting the presence of rare and/or unusual species are prepared as part of these projects.
The 600 MHz NMR spectrometer facility at OSU will be a state resource available for the solution of industrial as well as academic problems. The facility, to be housed in the Department of Chemistry, was made possible by gathering funding from state, private, and federal sources. Without this unique successful cooperation, the statewide NMR Facility would not now be a reality.
The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, formerly known as the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, is involved in ongoing research in several areas. Researchers in the department are studying the changes in oral communicative patterns which change as speakers increase in age. There are also studies being conducted comparing developmental speech acoustical patterns with those of mature and elder adults. Studies of speakers with a number of age-related communicative disorders are ongoing. Research also continues in the department to analyze communicative processes among children who have a variety of language disorders.
A collaborative project funded by the Raye Rawdon Norris Humanities Professorship brought guest artist, actor Terry Runnels, to campus. Runnels worked with students in musical theatre and starred in the production of Sweeney Todd presented by the Departments of Music and Theatre.
Projects in the Department of Philosophy range from a philosophical and historical study of a new version of Lao Tzu's Tao which makes use of information gained from two silk manuscripts of the Tao Te Ching discovered in China in 1973 to summer academies in paleontology for both high school students and teachers.
Studies being conducted in the Department of Physics are utilizing light scattering and laser Doppler velocimetry techniques to study statistical properties of turbulent motion in thermal convection. The research is of fundamental interest for understanding the nature of convective turbulence and is relevant to many practical applications in engineering, geography, and meteorology. Understanding heat transport phenomena under different boundary conditions will shed new light on technological improvements for more efficient heat transfer in various industrial applications ranging from heat exchangers in nuclear reactors to re-entry vehicles used in the space program.
Department of Psychology researchers are pursuing research in areas often reported in the media--Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and repressed memories. The repressed memory study may prove particularly important for the courts as part of the study will examine how jurors react to repressed and nonrepressed memory cases. The current study involving Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome is examining the psychological adjustment among participants of the peacekeeping mission in Somalia. At this point, relatively little is known about the unique stressors experienced by professional soldiers charged to enforce peacekeeping in precarious environments and even less is known about the psychological consequences of such duty.
The Department of Sociology is performing an important function for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services by conducting an ongoing evaluation of DHS programs which provide vital services to the state's developmentally disabled citizens. Information gained as a result of these tracking studies allows the DHS to provide services that improve the quality of life for these individuals. Not only do these studies provide vital information for DHS, but they also provide important training in interviewing methods and data analysis for graduate students in the department. Another project being conducted in the department is providing comprehensive data on the poor in Oklahoma. Ultimately, sound policy recommendations will be developed based on information gained as a result of this research.
Terrestrial wildlife toxicology is a rapidly evolving research area in the Department of Zoology. Ongoing work examines the effects of soils contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons on immunocompetence and DNA damage in small mammals. Developing research will examine the bioavailability of contaminants from soils by soil-dwelling invertebrates and vertebrates that may contact, ingest, or lay eggs in soils. Ultimately, the goal is to link models of bioavailability by various organisms with measured toxicology endpoints. This will allow interpretation of what the actual dose received by an organism is and what the effects of exposure to contaminated soils are.
While the research conducted at universities is sometimes considered too abstract to be useful, that is not necessarily the case. Much of the research conducted by faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences has immediate, practical applications. Researchers in the Department of Computer Science, for example, are assisting the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality in developing a database management system; local area networks (LANs) for USDA's Agricultural Research Service; and programs for desktop computers to assist in determining the effectiveness of various structures used in water resource management.
While this discussion offers only a sampling of the many interesting and innovative research projects being conducted by Arts and Sciences faculty, it is representative of the groundbreaking and worthwhile work being done in the College of Arts and Sciences by an outstanding group of nationally and internationally recognized researchers.