Accomplishments of VIGRE Grantees
There have been numerous successful individual activities instituted by VIGRE grantees; many of these are included in Margaret Cozzens’s book. For example, North Carolina State has begun an environmental statistics practicum linking statistics undergraduates and clients, and the University of Chicago brings large numbers of students in grades 7 through 12 for a summer mathematics enrichment program. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign introduced a research experience for graduate students to give graduate students in their first and second years an early research experience.
The University of Wisconsin introduced collaborative undergraduate research labs, where teams of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty explore mathematical topics, both pure and applied. The University of Washington conducted a workshop on working in industry to inform graduate students and postdocs about careers in industry and national labs. UCLA offers opportunities for graduate students to dip their toe into applications through a program of graduate summer internships with professors in the sciences, engineering, and medical schools.
NSF has not established any formal way to ensure that successful initiatives sponsored under VIGRE awards can be maintained at the conclusion of awards. To remedy this, the committee recommended that NSF convert the VIGRE program to one with longer-duration awards: a norm of 10 years, if a five-year review is satisfactory, though the second five-year award might be smaller and more focused than the initial award. Accompanying this change, the committee recommends that NSF require winning departments’ home institutions to make a commitment to sustain successful new initiatives resulting from VIGRE as the NSF funding phases down.
Quantifiable Goals
NSF needs to develop quantifiable goals for the VIGRE program and link these to consistent data requirements for all grantees and throughout the life of the VIGRE program. These steps will aid in maintaining a transparent evaluation process for the revised program and enable NSF to track the successes of individual VIGRE grants, thus informing future decisions about program continuation.
The committee observed that successful innovations at VIGRE sites were not being publicized in a way that maximized their potential for implementation at other universities. NSF should take the lead in developing a framework and infrastructure for a central source for information and communication regarding the successful initiatives of individual VIGRE awardees. In addition, all awardees should maintain and provide access to a VIGRE web site even after the expiration of their VIGRE award. Also, departments should be encouraged to disseminate examples of their VIGRE activities by, for example, developing resources that could be picked up by other departments.
VIGRE is a program designed to increase departmental interaction and cooperation; but it excludes a large portion of the graduate student and postdoctoral population: foreign nationals. Although they may participate in VIGRE activities, they are ineligible for financial support. This decision may be out of NSF’s control, but the committee believes that the goals of the VIGRE program as well as the national need to recruit the most talented people worldwide for positions in academe, industry, and government would be well served by the inclusion of foreign nationals in the program. This recommendation is in line with the 2005 report, “Policy Implications of International Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars in the United States,” written by the NRC’s Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy.
Although it is difficult to attribute changes in an institution’s mathematical sciences department to its VIGRE grant as opposed to other factors, the committee believes that the VIGRE program has produced a number of qualitative changes in mathematics and statistics departments that have held a grant and, through the proposal process, even some that have not. These include increasing the integration of students and faculty, providing more early opportunities for student research, helping to create a more welcoming culture for mathematics education at all levels, and offering a broader and more interdisciplinary range of options.
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