Dear friends of the college,

The early fall, with the influx of new students, the beginning of classes, and the renewal of the academic cycle, is the true New Year for the academy. Recognizing this new year does not require a calendar, just a walk around campus. There is an unmistakable and infectious energy in the air. By comparison, any celebration of January 1, when it comes, seems dry and more like the echo of ancient rituals.

For Penn State and the Eberly College of Science, the cycle that begins again now is not one of returning to the same point of a year ago, but one of building on the accomplishments of the past year. Some of the progress is directly visual. The new Chemistry Building, which was just a hole in the ground last fall, is now a remarkably large and growing assembly of concrete and steel beams from which the building is emerging. Work has now also begun on the Life Sciences Building. Other progress, such as the outstanding and still growing success of the fundraising campaign and the continuing upsurge in research activity in the college, and some of the challenges, such as the reduction in state support and corresponding large increase in tuition, can be represented by numbers.

Research in the Eberly College of Science is flourishing and growing in multiple forms and varieties. I am continually impressed by the ambition and accomplishment of our faculty who lead this vibrant and multifaceted enterprise and by the contributions of the students, postdoctoral scholars, and staff who make it go. In the 2001-02 fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2002, external research support awarded to faculty members in the college increased by 13.6 percent over the previous year. In four years, research funding in our college has increased by 70 percent. External support for the research carried out by the faculty, students, and staff of the Eberly College of Science now exceeds $60 million per year. In the departments with extensive laboratory-research programs, (Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Chemistry, and Physics), 92 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members, including newly-arrived faculty members, have obtained research funding through competitive grants and contracts.

This issue of Science Journal highlights some of the new research initiatives in our college. Research centers and other collaborative research programs are an increasing part of the research activity both here and across the country. As you might expect, the national competition for such centers and large programs is intense. Recently funded centers or large programs include

• an expansion of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to include work on nanomolecular structures in addition to previously funded work on collective phenomena in restricted geometries;
  
• the Floral Genome Project, a five-year, multi-institution collaboration funded by the NSF for comparative studies of plant development, evolution and gene function;
  
• the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, supported through the NSF’s Physics Frontier Center program;
  
• and the Center for Metastatic Cancer Research, funded in part by the National Foundation for Cancer Research and based at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

In addition, as you’ll see in this issue, there are many other large projects and centers located in or led by the Eberly College of Science. All of this activity is a result of the inspiration, expertise, and determination of the faculty members involved.

The vigor of the college is due in part to outstanding senior leaders among our faculty and in part to the ongoing renewal of our faculty as a whole. One of these outstanding senior leaders of the faculty is Professor C. R. Rao. I am delighted to report that Professor Rao’s enormous contributions to the discipline of modern statistics and its applications in many other fields were recognized this June by the awarding of the National Medal of Science, which is the nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in scientific research. President George W. Bush presented the medal in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. Professor Rao joined the Eberly College of Science faculty in the Department of Statistics in 1988 and just last year retired from the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics. He continues his research and his work for our college as director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis.

During the last five years, we have hired well over a hundred new faculty members, including seventy-seven who are tenured or on the tenure track. These seventy-seven recently appointed faculty members now constitute thirty-five percent of our tenured and tenure-track faculty. These new faculty members add new expertise, fresh ideas, and much enthusiasm to our many educational, service, and research initiatives. As a friend of the Penn State Eberly College of Science, you likely will share the pride at the beginning of this new academic year when you read about some of our faculty's initiatives and accomplishments in this issue of Science Journal.

Sincerely,

Daniel J. Larson
Dean, Eberly College of Science

To Science Journal Fall 2002 Index

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