 |
News in BriefArtsFor the RecordCalendarJobsArchived ScarletsScarlet Info |
ELVIRA SANATULLOVA ALLISON, middle, gets hooded by Aleidine Moeller, left, and Keith Parker, during UNL's first ever Celebration of Doctoral Hooding Aug. 13 in Kimball Hall. Allison, who received her doctorate in Educational Administration, Curriculum and Instruction, was the first of 89 graduate students who received their Ph.D.s following the summer session.
NU Researchers Key Partners in Web-Based Drought Monitor Drought Tracking System Unveiled at White HouseBy Kelly Smith, National Drought Mitigation Center University of Nebraska researchers at the National Drought Mitigation Center are key partners in the Drought Monitor, a new drought-tracking system unveiled at the White House last week. Federal officials highlighted the new tool along with other initiatives that aim to ease drought problems in the Northeastern United States during a Washington, D.C., news conference Aug. 11. The Drought Monitor is a new web-based tool for tracking widespread droughts. It highlights emerging trouble spots for various state and federal agencies that can help reduce drought's effects, said Donald Wilhite, an agricultural climatologist in NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources who heads the National Drought Mitigation Center here. The Drought Monitor is primarily designed for drought and water planners and policy-makers but could be of interest to anyone. "The Drought Monitor is as easy to understand as The Weather Channel's travel advisory, and that's a big difference between the monitor and other ways of looking at drought," Wilhite said. "The monitor makes it easier to identify problem areas and focus attention on them." The monitor shows how drought is affecting agriculture, wildfire danger and water supplies. For example, while individual farmers usually know when their fields are dry, the monitor shows how widespread the dryness is. No single definition of drought works in all circumstances, so planners rely on indices - data presented in various ways and usually depicted as maps - to recognize droughts. The Drought Monitor combines several indices to produce a single, easy-to-interpret map showing where drought is emerging, lingering and subsiding around the United States. It's updated as often as once a week, as needed. Drought Monitor and drought index maps are on a World Wide Web site at: http://enso.unl.edu/monitor. The Drought Monitor web site was designed by IANR staff and the center's staff maintains it at Nebraska in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on this project. "This is the latest product of ongoing efforts to improve timely drought monitoring nationwide and characterize its severity. This information can be used to coordinate drought planning and response efforts at the federal and state levels," Wilhite said. Wilhite has worked two decades to find better ways to monitor drought to improve decision-making. That's harder than it sounds. By the time a drought is apparent to a homeowner with a crispy lawn, or to a farmer with withered crops, it's too late for anything besides damage control. The challenge is recognizing drought, a slow onset or "creeping" natural disaster, before a region is engulfed, Wilhite said. He stressed that drought is a normal, recurring hazard nationwide. Wilhite established the National Drought Mitigation Center in 1995 with startup funds from NOAA and ongoing support from USDA. The center's interdisciplinary research team focuses on helping states prepare for drought and establish drought early warning systems. Early warning is a key in preparing for natural disasters, including drought, he said. A homeowner could use early warning of a drought to delay new landscaping for a year or a farmer might use early warning in selecting seed varieties. Mitigation-taking steps to reduce long-term vulnerability-also is key to disaster planning. Drought mitigation is partly a matter of recognizing the limits of natural systems and learning to live within them, or compensating with social systems, such as agreements on how to allocate water in times of scarcity, and with technology, such as dams and canals. The National Drought Mitigation Center is on the web: http://enso.unl.edu/ndmc. The center's research is conducted in cooperation with IANR's Agricultural Research Division. Torr: University Seeks Renaissance in Research
Since coming to UNL in mid-April, I have had the opportunity to meet with a few hundred faculty and administrators. I have been invited to visit colleges, schools, departments and labs, have met with faculty committees, and more than 120 faculty have participated so far in the research workshops. I have spent time with federal sponsors and with the Nebraska delegation in Washington, and have talked with supporters of the institution. I have looked at a great deal of data and compared our performance with other public, land-grant universities. There is much to like about UNL and there is much promise. As a result of this assessment, I believe that the University of NebraskaLincoln can advance its standing in the research university landscape and its value as a state asset. Why do we, a university community, do research? The research university is first and foremost an educational institution and to teach at the cutting-edge, we must be involved in research at the cutting edge. Failure to do so raises questions as to the quality of the education offered. Faculty involved in research tend to have a vitality that brings life to their teaching and invigorates their students. David Starr Jordan, president of Indiana University in the late 19th century, wrote: "The University should be the great refuge hut on the ultimate boundaries of knowledge, from which, daily and weekly, adventurous bands set out on voyages of discovery. The same house of refuge and supply will serve for a thousand different exploring parties, moving out in every direction." When Jordan wrote these words, the University of Nebraska was awarding its first doctoral degrees. Neither Jordan nor NU could have had any idea of what the American research university would go on to become-but Nebraska clearly recognized the value of advanced learning-learning that can only be gained at the boundary between the known and the unknown. Our graduate studies program is the oldest west of the Mississippi and one of the oldest in public universities anywhere in the United States. In 1909 the University of Nebraska became one of only 21 members of the Association of American Universities-one of only 10 public universities at that time. Since the 1890s, the research universities have assumed the responsibility for conducting approximately 80 percent of the funded basic research in the United States. All of our lives and the vitality of our higher education have been dramatically changed by what institutions such as this one have achieved. Of course, another reason we do research is because we have to-it is part of our makeup. We must explore and question and probe. We have no choice in the matter. This is who we are. This is why we have made research universities what they are and this is why we have made research universities our home. Teaching and/or research? Much of my life has been spent working in or with research universities. I believe that these institutions are priceless assets. They are the drivers of the future, and I do not know of a better place to be. And we can make UNL better than it is. The facts show that the faculty of UNL, as an aggregate, do about 50 percent less sponsored research than our regional peers and about 2.5 times less than those public land-grant universities ranked between about 25 and 50 nationally. As a result we lack the full teaching advantage and the enrollment drawing power that comes with a broad webbing of advanced research. We also have only about one quarter of the discretionary fund, or investment capital (built through indirect cost recovery) of the regional peers. This can be changed. The faculty and administration of the University of NebraskaLincoln have built a good research university that is positioned to become a great research university if it so chooses. Henry Rosovsky, a former dean at Harvard, wrote that the great universities of this country "share the strong and sometimes controversial belief that research and teaching are complementary activities; that university-level teaching is difficult without the new ideas and inspiration provided by research," and to those of us in a research environment, that seems a self-evident statement but it is a case that has to be remade every day. Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale Sterling Professor of History, wrote: " . . . the learning process does not mean only learning the WHAT of existing knowledge but learning the HOW of as yet unknown knowledge." It is the faculty of the leading research universities that understand the HOW of as yet unknown knowledge. It is in the research experience of the research university that a student comes to that wonderful realization that he or she can solve a problem that is not laid out in any textbook; for which there is no ready equation; no pre-defined steps. It is in the research university that bright students working with faculty in a research endeavor, learn the alchemy of dealing with the unknown and the poorly understood. This is a laboratory where one learns to deal with complex problems-the stuff of life ahead. There are many types of higher education institutions-many of them excellent in their mission. But it is in the rough-and-tumble of this imperfect but wonderful institution called a research university that the HOW of as yet unknown knowledge is taught. Why does Nebraska need a great research university? The State is dependent on the quality of UNL's education in every respect: our schools provide the business leaders, agriculturists, engineers, lawyers, journalists, architects, educators, artists, and shapers of the social fabric for the region. The land-grant status means that the university has the advantage of all of the connections to the state that the great land-grant traditions bring. And of course, it is the education and training of Ph.D.s that makes the institution a university. The top 100 research universities produce 80 percent of all doctoral degrees awarded annually and UNL is high in this list (ranked at 50). Ph.D.s from UNL will go on to be the faculty at hundreds of universities and colleges in the region and internationally-carrying with them the stamp of the research and graduate education of this institution-increasingly well equipped to look at things in new and different ways. This university will leave a footprint on history, the quality of life, and higher education that will extend far beyond our time and comprehension. Nebraska has unique and fundamental issues and it must have the decision-making skills to address these if it is to prosper in the future. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is the premier institution at which these decision-making skills are learned. The knowledge-base for such decision making, must be developed at UNL. From what I have seen, UNL has a basis for becoming a powerful knowledge-based influence on Nebraska's future. And any of Nebraska's issues, whether precision agriculture, new materials, climate variability, food safety, emerging resistant diseases, or knowledge management, require a strong research foundation. David Starr Jordan, in his description of the university more than a hundred years ago, wrote: ". . . after countless ages of education and scientific progress, the true university will stand at the boundaries, its walls still washed . . . by the boundless ocean of possible human knowledge." Our job, yours and mine, is to ensure that we keep repositioning UNL at the edge of knowledge. We are currently ranked at 106 in federal funding for research. This is too timid a position from which to meet our goals and to serve the state. There are those who believe that there are only 75 universities worthy of the designation "research university". No-we do not want to be a Harvard or an MIT-but we should be as good as the good public land-grant universities in almost every other state. We must move UNL out to amongst where the front 75 are positioned. Research enhancement If we can agree that research is fundamental to what we do, then we must find the means by which we can conduct that research. Some research requires modest resources-perhaps time and a good library-but much research must have substantial resources, good faculty and students, and infrastructure. This means sponsored programs and the pursuit of dollars. UNL has been diligent in its efforts to serve the state and has developed a broad and comprehensive suite of programs and fields of expertise represented by the strengths of its many colleges, schools, institutes and centers. Because Nebraska has a small population with somewhat limited resources, the University, while building a broad expanse of fields of knowledge, has not been able to develop great depth in a large number of areas. As a result of this, we must now become pioneers in a new approach to maximizing the resources of the institution in best service to the needs of the state. I call this new approach "mining the horizontal potential." We must quite literally convert the weakness of our breadth into a competitive strength of wider perspective. In order to compete, we must go beyond the boundaries of the traditional departments, schools and colleges and assemble expertise customized to address specific issues of state, regional and national importance. We can construct research critical mass in a number of areas by building overlays to our traditional disciplinary structure. Over the course of the summer we have held a number of workshops-each around a topic of high priority to the federal government and each a new funding opportunity. This constitutes the first step in an on-going process. In terms of mining the horizontal potential, these have been a prospecting exercise that has found riches. We have already identified several areas in which we can construct critical mass by building teams across our dispersed expertise. Indeed, by being forced to bring together very different disciplines, we have some advantage in addressing today's very complex issues that demand broad perspectives. Poincare, a mathematician in the early part of this century, wrote: "Invention is discernment and choice . . . Among chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those from domains which are far apart." I look forward to working with you to bring these domains together. |
By Marsha Torr, Vice Chancellor for Research
Back to Top
For questions regarding the Scarlet's Web pages, contact:
(402) 472-8518, Fax: (402) 472-7825