Dear colleagues,

I often say that universities are the best thing that human beings have ever invented for improving human wellbeing, and that universities are founded on four pillars — the discovery of knowledge (research); the dissemination of knowledge (education); moving knowledge into people’s lives (innovation); and building a more inclusive and just society because none of the other three can succeed without it.

The College continues to invest in the first pillar, research in the basic and applied sciences.  We have again set aside more than $1M for the Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS) program, startup funds, matching funds, and professional development. I hope that many of you will apply for the SciRIS-ii individual investigator program with awards up to $10K to establish or augment research relationships with partners external to COS. These awards can be used to accelerate project development, generate data or manuscripts, and foster proposal submissions. The deadline is December 15.

Alternatively, if you need support to maintain your lab or acquire equipment, apply for Betty Wang Discovery Funds (thanks to the generous endowment of $750K from the estate of Samual Wang). This award also has a deadline of December 15. Collaborative, team-based SciRIS stage 2 and 3 proposals, together with awards totaling $275,000 to accelerate the pace of research, discovery and innovation, are due April 15, 2020. As always, these and other upcoming opportunities can be found at ECOS. From these awards totalling $1M, the College continues to provide some or all cost-share on RERF, NSF-MRI and private foundation proposals and grants.

Beyond these $1M of funds, the College annually invests about $200K per year in facilities such as the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance instrument (NMR), the Electron Microscope facility, the  X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy facility and the Mass Spectrometry facility. The College provides access to about $250K/year in graduate fellowships for research from Provost’s funds, ARCS Fellowships, the Wei Family Private Foundation and the Larry Martin and Joyce O’Neill Fellowship. Bettye Maddux, director of research development, offers proposal and other pre-award support. The College also continues to assist with graduate student tuition-remission support.  

In this newsletter, you can read about some of the success that our faculty and students have had in research and knowledge discovery, such as Ryan Mehl’s interdisciplinary research targeting the development of cancer imaging tools, May Nyman’s ongoing exploration into chemical processes and materials to clean up radioactive waste, and senior zoology major/transfer student Chantelle MacAdams’ probe into the survival rate of sea stars following a severe marine ecosystem epidemic.

I also want to share good news about the second pillar, education. OSU’s first-year retention surged by 1.2% last year, to 85.4%. This is the highest rate of first-year retention on record, and portends an increase in our graduation rate in the coming years. Furthermore, 87.5% of students who started in Science last year were retained at OSU, which is also our highest on record. I am convinced that these improvements are because of your hard work to improve courses, advising and other elements of the first-year experience. (We still have a lot of work to do to narrow the achievement gap for Pell-eligible and historically underrepresented students.) I also want to thank those of you who are volunteering for the Faculty-Student Mentor Program (FSMP). We just received preliminary numbers for first-year retention of FSMP students, and the results are very encouraging. Look for an announcement of official results in the New Year.  

With the holidays approaching (and the impending launch of our new website), we will be taking a break from the Dean’s Newsletter at the end of December. The next edition will come out at the end of January. I wish you all a good end of the term and holiday break.

Roy Haggerty
Dean, College of Science

Research Funding

Physicist Yun-Shik Lee received a $380K award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project “High-Field Terahertz Driven Photocarrier Dynamics in Nanomaterials.”

Chemist May Nyman received $200K from the University of Notre Dame for her project “Actinide Center of Excellence.”

Chemist Walter Loveland was awarded $170K by the US Department of Energy for his project “Large Scale Nuclear Collective Motion: Fission, Fusion and Multi-Nucleon Transfer.”

Chemist David Ji received a $60K grant from the Argonne National Laboratory for his project, “Multivalent Battery Cathode Stability and Characterization.”

Biochemist Ryan Mehl received $22K from the University of Michigan for his project “Unnatural Amino Acid Chemistry for Lysine Methyltransferase Substrate Discovery.”

Research Proposal Support

You can find funding opportunities on ECOS. To access a suite of tools and resources available to faculty, visit the College of Science Proposal Support webpage.

Global Honors

Chemist Mas Subramanian was an invited speaker at the Herakleidon Museum in Athens, Greece, for the “Symposium on the History, Technology and Research of the Color Blue,” November 9, 2019. The symposium was held in the context of the exhibition “The Blue Hour” by painter Olga Alexopoulou.

Speakers at the symposium included top academics and researchers on the color blue from around the world, covering topics starting from Ancient Greece and reaching all the way to the most cutting-edge technology being developed at Silicon Valley right now. Subramanian has given talks at museums all over the world on his discovery of the YInMn Blue pigment, the first inorganic blue pigment in 200 years: Getty Museum (LA, USA), Rijks museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Vatican Color Science symposium, Paint Istanbul (Turkey),  Winterthur Museum (DE, USA).

Oregon Honors

Congratulations to 2019 ARCS Foundation Oregon Chapter Scholars: First-year integrative biology Ph.D. students Rachael Aber and Maya Feezell and biochemistry Ph.D. student Brittany Lasher. They are among the 26 young scientists and engineers in the state and among 14 Oregon State University students who received scholarships from ARCS Foundation Oregon this year. The competitive 3-year $18,000 scholarship is awarded to #STEM graduate students at OSU, OHSU & the University of Oregon. Read more about the College of Science 2019 ARCS Scholars.

College Honors

Congratulations to these award-winning faculty and staff who were recognized for their outstanding achievements in research and administration at the 2019 Fall Faculty and Staff Awards held on November 21.

Outstanding Faculty Research Assistant- Bill Freund, Chemistry

Gladys Valley Award for Exemplary Administrative Support – Mary Fulton, Microbiology

College of Science Inclusive Excellence Award – Vrushali Bokil, Mathematics; Physicists for Inclusion in Science, Physics

College of Science Distinguished Service Award – Margie Haak, Chemistry; Randall Milstein, Physics

Champion of Science Award – Bettye Maddux, Chemistry

Dean’s Early Career Impact Award – Kimberly Halsey, Microbiology; Rebecca Terry, Integrative Biology

Milton Harris Award in Basic Research – Ryan Mehl, Biochemistry and Biophysics

F.A. Gilfillan Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Science – Michael Blouin, Integrative Biology

SciRIS Individual Investigator Winner – Bo Sun, Physics

SciRIS Stage 1 – Matt Graham (Physics), Ha Yeon (Paul) Cheong (Chemistry)

SciRIS Stage 2: Ryan Mehl (Biochemistry and Biophysics), Richard B. Cooley (Biochemistry and Biophysics), Weihong Qiu (Physics), Christopher Cebra (Veterinary Medicine)SciRIS Stage 2: Chris Beaudry (Chemistry), Victor Hsu (Biochemistry and Biophysics), Siva Kolluri (Environmental and Molecular Toxicology)

YInMn Blue in Greek! Chemist Mas Subramanian’s talk on the discovery of YInMn Blue in the symposium at Athens’ Herakleidon Museum was featured in Athens’ daily newspaper.

Microbiology major Sarah Olson’s college advice was featured in The New York Times article “Going to College? Take Their Advice.” The newspaper put out a call for college advice from students and selected a few from the hundreds of responses it received. “Community college changed my life for the better, and I want other people to know it’s O.K. to take a nontraditional path,” shared Olson.

Kudos to microbiology faculty Linda Bruslind and the Microbiology Student Association, whose art entry “Microbiology Mosaic” was chosen as a finalist in its category for the People’s Choice Award by the American Society for Microbiology‘s Agar Art 2019 Contest. ACM received 347 entries from 43 countries this year. OUTSTANDING JOB!

“Saving Atlantis,” a feature-length documentary on coral reefs produced by Oregon State University filmmakers, is now streaming and accessible to viewers worldwide on digital platforms, including Amazon, Google Play and iTunes. The film’s producers followed coral microbiologist Rebecca Vega Thurber and other researchers from Oregon State and around the world who are uncovering the causes of coral decline and looking to find solutions so they don’t completely disappear.

Chemist May Nyman, her research and her lab group were featured in a profile by OSU’s research magazine, Terra “A Feeling for Molecules.”

The Physics 20X series launched online fall term! Following their tremendous success in modernizing the curriculum in the Introductory Algebra-based Physics series, physics instructor KC Walsh and a team of faculty and students have designed a fully online version of the flipped classroom curriculum. The sequence went live this fall.

Zoology senior and transfer student Chantelle McAdams took up marine biology at OSU in her mid-twenties after discovering a passion for scuba diving and oceans during a year of travel in Australia and Southeast Asia. A SURE Science summer research scholarship helped her undertake a sea anemone project and hone her skills in field research.

The College celebrated its 2019 Alumni Awards on October 10. Check out the photos from the award ceremony.

The nation’s first online bachelor’s degree program in zoology has launched! This zoology degree is housed in our very own Department of Integrative Biology. Congratulations to faculty who have worked hard to develop and launch the College’s first online bachelor’s degree!

Welcome!

Kyriakos Stylianou is a new assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. Originally from Cyprus, Dr. Stylianou joins us most recently from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Valais-Wallis campus in the heart of the Alps in southern Switzerland. His research focuses on materials chemistry, specifically open porous metal-organic framework (MOFs) for advanced applications.

Microbiology department head search

The College and the Department of Microbiology launched an internal search for a new department head. Current department head Jerri Bartholomew will continue to serve as department head through June 2020. Lisa Ganio, department head of Statistics, will chair the search committee. The position will be open to all full professors tenured in microbiology.

Statistics conference StanCon 2020 will be held at Oregon State University, August 11-14, 2020. Co-organized by Associate Professor of Statistics Debashis Mondal, the conference will feature two days of tutorials followed by two days of talks, open discussions and statistical modeling.

2020 Undergraduate Student Success Summit:
Call for proposals

Faculty are invited to contribute to the 2020 Undergraduate Student Success Summit, an opportunity to learn from and with one another as ts OSU collectively works toward achieving the engagement, retention, achievement and graduation goals defined in Strategic Plan 4.0. The Summit will be held on March 5, 2020.

Undergraduate Student Success Initiative (USSI) efforts are organized around five topical areas: Curricular Excellence, Experiential & Research-based Learning, Faculty-Student Interactions, Financial Aid & Scholarships, and the Transition Experience.

Please submit your proposal by January 17, 2020.

OSU Women’s Giving Circle grant opportunity

If you are in need of funding for a special project to enrich the undergraduate experience, consider submitting a proposal for an OSU Women’s Giving Circle grant. Founded in the spring of 2003 by a group of OSU alumnae and friends, the Women’s Giving Circle has awarded nearly $1 million in grants to more than 140 projects that enhance the undergraduate experience, directly impact as many OSU students as possible and improve student retention. Last year, the Women’s Giving Circle awarded more than $74,000 to 11 OSU programs.

To apply for a grant, please visit osufoundation.org/wgc_grant. All proposals are due by Monday, January 13, 2020, at 9 a.m. Grants will be announced in May 2020.

The College’s Project Manager Tze-Yiu Yong has assembled a College policies web page: https://internal.science.oregonstate.edu/cospolicies.

Upcoming events

December 6
Corvallis-OSU Symphony: Holiday Concert
7:30 – 9:30 p.m., LaSells Stewart Center

The Corvallis-OSU Symphony presents its annual holiday concert, featuring lights, classics and choral-orchestral favorites with OSU choirs.

December 6-7
Annual Holiday Marketplace
10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Memorial Union Ball room

Don’t miss this annual arts and crafts fair that showcases top artistic talent and original artwork. The event will include beautiful handmade crafts, fine arts and specialty food from over 80 Pacific Northwest artists.

January 13, 2020
Where the Willamette Valley’s Wild Things Live!
6 p.m., Old World Deli, 341 SW 2nd St., Corvallis

Samantha Bartling, from the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex, will take us on an exploration of our local wildlands and share updates on the latest science that drives their management of this refuge area.

February 11, 2020
State of the University
11 a.m. – 1:30 p.m., Oregon Convention Center, Portland

Join President Ed Ray – as he approaches the close of his 17-year tenure – to celebrate the continuing momentum, leadership and impact of Oregon State University across the state and around the world.

Recent Events

November 21
2019 College of Science Fall Faculty and Staff Awards celebrating research and administrative excellence