Other CAREER award recipients at MU, such as Sanjeev Khanna, an associate professor of engineering, and Patrick Market, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences, have already made significant progress on projects designed to advance both scientific understanding and student participation. Each also has important implications for public health and safety.

Khanna and his students are working to perfect a more effective type of "hurricane glass" -- the material used in office towers, hospitals and other glass-enclosed buildings located in areas menaced by tropical storms. After more than three years of research, Khanna last year unveiled a "glass-fiber reinforced polymer" pane that can withstand the worst nature has to offer. In one trial, reported in Illumination's Fall 2003 edition, Khanna's students blasted a 90-gram bullet into the panel at 60 mph. It held.

Market's research, also detailed in the Fall 2003 edition of Illumination, explores another dangerous weather phenomenon, convective snowfall. The storms that produce these snows, also called "thunder snows" because they typically include lightning and thunder, are capable of producing heavy accumulations that can bury cities for days.

As part of his Research on Convective Snows Project, Market has invited the participation of an impressive array of student collaborators. Select high schoolers attend summer workshops on meteorology and forecasting; undergraduates use Convective Snows Project data (gathered by graduate students working in the field) in lab assignments over the course of the semester, eventually working with the high school workshop participants to develop their own thunder snow forecasts. Even members of the public are encouraged to participate in an outreach effort that encourages weather watchers to report thunder snowstorms on the project's Web site.

Investigations producing a high degree of education and research integration are not new to the NSF-funded, says Courtney. But the foundation's emphasis on promoting them is.

"You probably recall that during the decade of the 90s there was a fair amount of criticism from state legislators that there wasn't enough time devoted by researchers to actual education on campus," he says. "I think there was a certain response to that, and a recognition that paying attention to the broader impacts of basic research was a legitimate expectation on the part of the taxpayers who fund this agency."

J. Erik Loehr, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says he didn't need to be persuaded. "I've always been convinced that being a good researcher makes you a better teacher." That's especially true in his area of engineering, he explains, since students are forced to learn by doing: "Students don't get this specialty unless they have a graduate degree. Part of the reason is that each project that one gets in professional practice is very much like a little research project."

Loehr was awarded his $387,000 CAREER grant in June 2001. The award has allowed him to further his probe into the mechanics of slope failure, a little-studied phenomenon that has broad implications for countless public and private construction and infrastructure maintenance projects.

The centerpiece of Loehr's CAREER award project is a huge machine he calls a "large-scale tilt apparatus," essentially a landslide simulator fashioned from a massive pneumanic jack and an open-ended dump truck bed.

The bed of the device, the largest of its kind in the nation, can be filled with compacted earth and stone to approximate real-world slopes; during tests it can be raised or lowered to reproduce various natural or man-made conditions. It is also equipped with a sprinkler system so that researchers can create "rain" to muddy up various stabilizing schemes.

Loehr, whose teaching was recently recognized with an MU Excellence in Education Award, is convinced that his tilt apparatus caught the eye of NSF reviewers for an added benefit: it helps engineering students get their hands dirty. Using numerical modeling techniques, students will make slope failure predictions that can be tested through tilting. The results of their experiments, he says, go well beyond data collection.

"Certainly it accomplishes a number of things," Loehr says. "It lets them say, 'OK, this is what I'm going to do instead of just being in class.' In class it can be hard for them to figure out how they are going to take what we're talking about and actually apply it. The research gets them doing something in which they actually have to use classroom skills. It also motivates many of them to go on to graduate work or to pursue other engineering interests."