Boundary-breaking math and statistics program gets $5M NSF renewal

Boundary-breaking math and statistics program gets $5M NSF renewal
VIGRE represents unique partnership among Math, Statistics, CAAM

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Rice’s innovative, five-year effort to collapse the boundaries between students and faculty across the departments of Mathematics, Statistics and Computational and Applied Mathematics has earned a five-year, $5 million renewal grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Vertical Integration of Research and Education (VIGRE) program brings together faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduates in a dozen or more cross-disciplinary seminar sections each semester. The program, which is run jointly by the three departments, opens new dimensions of the mathematical research and education experience to Rice students at all levels.

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“The NSF sees a continuing and growing problem in meeting the national need for trained mathematical scientists now and in the coming decades,” said Michael Wolf, professor and chair of mathematics and a co-principal investigator on the VIGRE II renewal grant. “VIGRE is designed to meet that need by showing mathematically inclined students the possibilities in mathematics and statistics research and by allowing them to see themselves as professional mathematicians and statisticians.”

VIGRE seminar sections are known as “PFUGs.” Pronounced like the word “fugue,” the acronym derives from the groups’ composition of postgraduates, faculty, undergraduates and graduate students. The name derives from the musical meaning for fugue, which refers to an idea that is introduced by one voice and developed by others.

“The PFUGs were intended to engage undergraduates in mathematical research, increase the breadth of research activities available to graduate students, provide postdocs with both caring mentors and eager mentees and to dramatically increase the professional skills — most notably speaking and writing — of each participant,” said Steve Cox, professor of computational and applied mathematics and the principal investigator on the VIGRE II grant.

Cox said the PFUG structure has proven to be “wildly successful.”

“PFUGs and their associated research seminars are now proud, shared emblems of our three departments,” he said.

Sallie Keller-McNulty, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and professor of statistics, said, “The proven success of our VIGRE program demonstrates that research and education can be seamlessly integrated throughout the educational experience, from undergraduate to postgraduate. We are already replicating this model in other areas of engineering.”

Almost all PFUGs are interdisciplinary. By their very nature, they strive to weave together intellectual paths from pure math, numerical methods, statistics and a particular area of science, like finance, genetics or medical imaging. Furthermore, each PFUG is centrally focused on an active research question.

“The seminars do not merely expose undergraduates to the obstacles that lie at the frontier of mathematical research, but rather challenge and empower them to discover, digest and overcome these obstacles,” Cox said. “From early successes, young members evolve into team leaders and powerful magnets for the mathematically inclined.”

The goal of VIGRE II is to extend the PFUG experience from a relatively small group of students to most students majoring in mathematics, statistics and CAAM, as well as to other universities across the country.

“In VIGRE I, faculty used their individual creativity in the management of their PFUGs,” said Katherine Ensor, professor and chair of statistics and a co-principal investigator on the VIGRE II renewal grant. “As part of VIGRE II, the various PFUG strategies will be captured in a compilation of PFUG experiences and research outcomes in a ‘How to PFUG’ manuscript that will be developed and published online through Connexions.”

Wolf said, “Getting a second VIGRE grant is quite difficult. Lots of schools can create an interesting pilot program but then can’t really answer the question as to what comes next. We were very fortunate to get the support of the senior administration in convincing the NSF that we could expand this program and institutionalize it so that undergraduate research would become a common, rather than an unusual, occurrence on the campus.”