Cornell College receives $500,000 STEM grant

April 20, 2023

The Sherman Fairchild Foundation has awarded Cornell College a $500,000 grant to fund new STEM equipment and upgrade facilities on campus.

Five faculty members standing in front of Russell Science Center on the Cornell College campus. — (left to right) Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Catherine Volle, W.F. Johnston Professor of Physics and Engineering Kara Beauchamp, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ajit Chavan, Professor of Geology Emily Walsh, and Assistant Professor of Statistics Tyler George worked together to develop the grant request.

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. This will have a really big impact on what we can do with our students each block–both in terms of classwork and research,” said Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Catherine Volle, who led the team that wrote the grant. “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 the summer of 2027. Among the upgrades, crews will install 24 new geographic information system (GIS) computers and renovate a lab space in Norton Geology Center.

“This is a computer software system that can integrate all sorts of data within a geographic framework,” said Professor of Geology Emily Walsh. “GIS is useful for managing and analyzing data from across the divisions, making it an extremely valuable tool for our students who find that having GIS on their resume is a game-changer.”

This grant also includes resources to create a second statistics lab in West Science Hall.

“The new statistics classroom will be an active learning environment where students work in groups around a single table with a shared large screen,” said Assistant Professor of Statistics Tyler George. “They will all have access to the same provided laptops equipped for computations to support equitable learning and access to these fields of study. ”

The college will also 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 also get to use a new Langmuir-Blodgett trough, contact angle goniometer, and tabletop scanning electron microscope by the time the four-year grant is complete. Volle says students at Cornell get a lot of opportunities to use STEM equipment that they wouldn’t have at other colleges, and this funding will further expand the hands-on experiences that prepare them for their futures.

“Our students can access this equipment on the block plan, where they’re taking One Course At A Time for 3½ weeks, which I think is really powerful,” Volle said. “It’s important that we are training our students as modern scientists.”

Full equipment list: