Deana Pennington, research faculty at the LTER Network Office, has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue her work on enabling science communities to incorporate advanced technologies into their research (see related story in "Unique LNO virtual training launches in cyberspace," Network News Vol. 20, No1, or online at www.lternet.edu/news/Article151.html).
The project, titled CI-Team: Advancing Cyberinfrastructure-Based Science through Education, Training, and Mentoring of Science Communities, is funded through the Office of Cyberinfrastructure CI-Team program for workforce development in computational science and engineering. It develops a process for mobilizing a group of distributed, interdisciplinary scientists into a community of practice to effectively embed technology-enhanced approaches into their work, and investigates methods for enabling collaborative research design. The project uses a combination of activities informed by creative thinking and problem-solving theory, social science, and organizational learning theory. All activities integrate research with education through problem-based, experiential learning by a community of practice while solving real problems.
The project is being conducted with a group of scientists engaged in forecasting the impact of climate, population, and land cover/land use change on plant distributions in the American Southwest, and investigating human and environmental consequences of those changes. The project partners the scientists with technology and cyberinfrastructure specialists to design collaborative research that overcomes technical barriers to complex scientific analyses.
By Deana Pennington, LNO