Cornell College, located in Mount Vernon, Iowa, has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to fund new STEM equipment and upgrade facilities on campus.
Geology, environmental science, computer science, physics and engineering, biology, chemistry, mathematics and statistics, and data science professors teamed up to develop the request, which was fully funded.
“It’s a great feeling to receive this $500,000 grant, which is significant for Cornell College,” Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Catherine Volle, who led the grant writing team, said in a release. “This will have a really big impact on what we can do with our students each block – both in terms of classwork and research. This is equipment that will be utilized during the Cornell Summer Research Institute, and it will open up a lot of possibilities for faculty and students on campus all year long.”
The four-year grant includes equipment and facility upgrades that will be installed in phases until 2027. Among the upgrades, crews will install 24 new geographic information system (GIS) computers and renovate a lab space in Norton Geology Center. The grant also includes resources to create a second statistics lab in West Science Hall.
The college also will receive funding for a high-performance scientific computing cluster, which will make new multidisciplinary scientific research projects with large amounts of data possible in the areas of quantitative paleobiology, artificial intelligence, applied science, data science, chemistry, and physics.
Science students will use a new Langmuir-Blodgett trough, contact angle goniometer and tabletop scanning electron microscope by the time the four-year grant is complete. Ms. Volle said students at Cornell get a lot of opportunities to use STEM equipment that they wouldn’t have at other colleges, and this funding expands the hands-on experiences that prepare them for their futures.
The full equipment list includes:
- Tabletop scanning electron microscope
- Contact angle goniometer
- 24 geographic information system (GIS) Computers
- Upgrades to Norton classroom for conversion to a GIS laboratory
- Langmuir-Blodgett trough
- High-performance computer cluster
- Computer resources for second statistics lab
The grant also supports the hiring of a half-time equipment technician to care for the equipment upgrades.
