The second goal is to advance a new relationship between research and student training. Visualize the research process as a triangle, he says. Research makes up one side of the triangle, teaching makes up another. The remaining side represents the integration of research and education, "the important third part of the triangle that connects the other two."

Integration means more than undergraduates scrubbing instruments in labs, Courtney says. It means inviting students, and sometimes even interested members of the public, to learn by direct participation in the process of discovery. Courtney concedes that this won't be easy. "The harder part of the triangle is involving the students in advancing the research. Investigators have to think more creatively about what sorts of data their students can produce, or what sort of analyses students can get involved in."

There are six MU faculty members who hold active CAREER grants. The most recent recipient among them is Matthew Gompper, a 40-year-old assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife. Gompper is interested in how disease spreads among wild animals, particularly the role played by various parasites. His investigations routinely take him to remote locations around the world.

At MU, he is perhaps best known as the head of Tigers for Tigers, a group formed six years ago to help preserve the University's endangered mascot. Despite his wealth of research experience, Gompper admits his first application for a CAREER award failed the NSF creativity test.

"This was actually the third time I had applied for it," Gompper says. "Each time you work on something, you find a way to make it better. You know, the review process really works, it points out when your stuff is good but not great. I think the third time around my idea of creating a consortium for studying wildlife diseases was the factor that really gave it a leg up in the minds of the reviewers."

The consortium Gompper proposed will consist of an MU-based group of environmental scientists who will investigate how changes in animal habitat affect the way diseases are spread -- particularly diseases transmitted by parasites. Student interns will play a key role in developing studies, collecting data and analyzing results.

"Before coming up with the consortium idea I had created other possibilities for internships, and I had talked about designing a new course," Gompper recalls. NSF proposal reviewers weren't satisfied, however, politely telling him that while new internships and courses were fine, they didn't pass muster as "creative" forms of teaching and research integration.

"That forced me to think on a larger scale about how I could do something novel on the teaching side of things," Gompper says. "So I started thinking about these internships and how I could help the interns make a real contribution. I realized I couldn't take on a bunch of interns myself; that would be superficial. I had to bring in more researchers for them to work with. So I thought: 'What would bring these people to agree that coming together was a worthwhile thing?' The answer was creating a consortium through which everyone would benefit, the students and the researchers."