DATE: January 17, 2002

TO: Board of Regents

FROM: Geoffrey Gamble, President, MSU-Bozeman

RE: Campus Report for the January, 2002 Board of Regents Meeting

MSU begins new biomedical research program for Montana

Montana State University-Bozeman has received a new three-year $6-million grant to increase the biomedical research capacity of Montana. Adele Pittendrigh, associate Dean of MSU's College of Letters and Science is the program's director. The Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) grant was one of 24 given in the nation. It came from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), which is a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Participating institutions are the University of Montana, the McLaughlin Research Institute, Western Montana College of the University of Montana, Montana Tech of the University of Montana, MSU-Billings, MSU-Northern and all seven of Montana's Tribal Colleges.

 

Water Quality Monitoring System To Be Developed for NASA Spacecraft

Through a research and development partnership facilitated by the Montana State University's TechLink Center, Montana Microbiological Services, LLC (MMS) of Bozeman has won a contract from NASA Johnson Space Center to begin early stage development of an automated water quality monitoring system that can detect microscopic contaminants in closed water systems like those on spacecraft or submarines. MMS's proposal was one of 325 selected from a pool of 1,659 submitted this year. TechLink is funded to link companies in Montana and the surrounding region with federal laboratories for joint research and technology transfer.

 

Nursing Certificate Program Begins at MSU

Registered nurses with master's degrees in nursing who want to become family nurse practitioners can enroll in a new certificate program offered through the four campuses of the College of Nursing at Montana State University in Bozeman. The program was approved last month by the Montana Board of Regents. Family nurse practitioners provide primary health care and can write prescriptions. In some Montana communities that lack physicians or other primary care providers, family nurse practitioners provide much of the routine health care. The new non-degree certificate program is structured for part-time study and can be accessed via distance-delivery connections at one of the MSU-Bozeman College of Nursing campuses in Bozeman, Billings, Great Falls or Missoula.

 

Graumlich appointed director of MSU's Big Sky Institute

Dr. Lisa Graumlich, a Montana State University professor who is an internationally respected ecologist as well as a former dean of the Earth Learning Center at the Biosphere 2, has been selected as executive director of MSU's Big Sky Institute for Science and Natural History (BSI). MSU Provost David Dooley has charged Graumlich to link the MSU campus with the Big Sky community and people around the country who are interested and concerned about the Greater Yellowstone region. He has also asked Graumlich to fold the current activities of the Mountain Research Center into the larger BSI program.

 

MSU student to publish book of historic Crow stories

Phenocia Bauerle, a senior at Montana State University and an enrolled member of the Crow Tribe, has become a storyteller with a contemporary twist. She has edited a book of Crow stories that will be published next spring. "The Way of the Warrior: Stories from along the Elk River" is to be published by the prestigious University of Nebraska Press. The book's stories are about Crow warriors who lived in the time before contact with non-Indian influences, roughly 1800-1860. They were passed to Bauerle by her grandfather, Crow elder Barney Old Coyote, who now lives in Billings. He and his brother, the late Henry Old Coyote, recorded the stories from elders still living when the Old Coyote brothers returned from World War II.