TO:����������������� Board of Regents

����������������������� Commissioner Crofts

 

FROM:������������� Geoffrey Gamble

����������������������� President, MSU-Bozeman

 

RE:����������������� Campus Report for the July, 2001 Board of Regents Meeting

 

 

�         Montana State University juniors Leo Killsback and Phenocia� Bauerle have received the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowships for minority students entering the teaching profession. They received two of only 25 fellowships nationwide. Fellows receive $2,500 for their summer projects. Upon graduation and acceptance into an approved master's degree program, fellows are awarded $16,000 for two years of full time study.

 

Killsback, of Busby, is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. He is majoring in mathematical sciences with a teaching option. Bauerle of Bozeman, is an enrolled member of the Crow Nation. She is majoring in English literature.

 

�         A.J. Stoneburner came to Montana State University because he was a talented athlete, but it is his abilities in art that have brought him international recognition. He was the American winner of the 2001 Agfa Young Artist contest. His winning poster design earned Stoneburner an all-expense paid trip to Belgium to meet with the other international winners at Agfa's headquarters in Antwerp.

 

Anne Garner, herself an award-winning professor, assigned all students in her junior design class to enter the Agfa 2001 Young Creatives Competition. The company said it received more than 3,000 entries. Stoneburner's entry was selected by a panel of jurors that included a print specialist, a communications professional, and two designers.

 

�         Suzanne Christopher, an associate professor in the health and human development at MSU, received $768,000 from the American Cancer Society (ACS) for a program aimed at preventing cervical cancer on the Crow Indian Reservation. Native American women have the highest rate of cervical cancer among all minority populations, Christopher said.

 

Her project, called Messengers for Health, will create a network of female community leaders on the Crow Reservation to educate other women about the disease and encourage routine screening.

 

�         Valerie Copie, an MSU assistant professor of biochemistry, recently was awarded a $380,000 grant from American Cancer Society. Copie is studying a protein that plays a role in cancer metastasis. "When a cancer cell is especially aggressive, there's a high expression of the protein on the cell surface," Copie said. "These cells are resistant to standard chemotherapy." She wants to figure out the structure of the protein so that its action in the body could perhaps be blocked and metastasis halted.

�

�         The difference between being just a place to sleep and eat and being a� home-away-from-home makes Montana State University's residence halls tops in the nation. In May the Residence Hall Association (RHA) at MSU won the prestigious School of the Year Award from the National Association of College and University Residence Halls (NACURH). MSU bested other finalists including� Stephen F. Austin State University, Washington State University, State University of New York, University of Georgia and the University of Chicago.

 

�         The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the Burns Telecommunications Center and the Physics Department at Montana State University $2 million over a four year period to develop and electronically deliver professional development short� courses for elementary teachers. The National Teacher's Enhancement Network: Elementary (NTEN) project housed at MSU will establish graduate professional development courses for elementary teachers� that will be available nationally and internationally through the World Wide Web. The professional development modules will be designed by teams of scientists, instructional technologists and in-service teachers. They will focus on specific content areas that are linked with commercially available science kits used in elementary science education.

 

�         Jonathan Driggers will be a ninth grader at Capital High School in Helena this fall and was one of 16 middle school students who helped launch a high altitude balloon from the Big Timber airport June 30. The middle school students were attending the Montana Space Odyssey Camp at MSU. The balloon rose to 86,233 and feet and, after drifting 77 miles east of Big Timber, the parachute and payload landed in a pasture six miles southeast of Billings. Since the balloon made it above 98 percent of the atmosphere, on-board digital photos showed the blackness of space, the blue layers of the atmosphere and the curvature of the earth. MSU students who mentored the middle school students, are themselves designing and building a miniature satellite scheduled to fly in May, 2002, on a Russian rocket.