Fellows from across the country spend the summer at NCSA

released 09.11.06

Contact
Trish Barker
NCSA Public Information Specialist
tlbarker@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.8013

URBANA, IL — A notice on a listserv caught Timothy Huerta's attention and prompted him to apply for one of the first NCSA Summer Faculty Fellowships. A professor in the health organizational management program at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Huerta spent this summer at NCSA developing a network-centric approach for tobacco control research. The goal of comprehensive tobacco control programs is to reduce disease, disability, and death related to smoking by preventing young people from starting, encouraging young people and adults who smoke to quit, eliminating nonsmokers' exposure to secondhand smoke, and identifying and eliminating the disparities related to tobacco use and its effects among different population groups.

"The summer fellowship provided me the opportunity to explore tools that enable researchers to work together, even though geographically separated. I looked at things from the non-technical perspective -- what do people working in similar research areas need in a virtual community in order to interact -- and NCSA provided the technical expertise to make it happen," says Huerta of the Web portal that's being created. "People need a very simple way of managing their complex research relationships across university firewalls."

His work in tobacco control is an exemplar for public health, he says, and should be adaptable to other health concerns such as diabetes or heart attacks, allowing researchers and public health officials to look at problems holistically.

Huerta says he was already collaborating with Nosh Contractor, director of NCSA's Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group, when he saw the summer fellowships announcement. Being a Summer Faculty Fellow, he says, allowed him to engage in a research project with national, possibly even global, implications that otherwise was not possible.

The other summer 2006 fellows and their projects were:

• Wendy Cho, Northwestern University, "A Scientific Approach to Redistricting Analysis."
• Frederico Fonseca, The Pennsylvania State University, "An Ontology-Driven Model for the Efficient Use of Provenance Information."
• Thanh Truong, University of Utah, "Developing a Grid-Enabled Cyberinfrastructure for Education in Computational Chemistry."

Building on a successful launch this year, funding will again be available for six summer fellowships in 2007 for faculty from institutions other than the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are interested in contributing to the creation of a national cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering. (Fellowships are available for University of Illinois faculty during the academic year). Fellowships include 10 weeks' salary, local housing expenses, and travel to and from Urbana-Champaign. Application details will be online (http://fellowships.ncsa.uiuc.edu/) in early 2007. Questions should be directed to Radha Nandkumar, head of NCSA's Office of Campus and International Relations, at radha@ncsa.uiuc.edu or 217-244-0650.

 

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