Denison - DePauw - Furman - Harvey Mudd - Middlebury - Rhodes - Scripps - Vassar

June 4 - 5, 2009 at Denison University

This workshop was sponsored by a Mellon Faculty Career Enhancement grant.

The central objective of the workshop was to develop a deeper understanding among science faculty members of the uses of mathematics and computer science in the natural sciences and an equally crucial appreciation among computer science faculty for work in the natural sciences and the broad utility of computer science across a significant portion of most undergraduate curricula. We are not solely interested in what computing skills our introductory computer science courses should provide for science students; we are interested in a broader view. We want to identify concepts that are important for students of both computer science and the natural sciences, encouraging a two-way exchange of these ideas.

Computation for Scientists

May 31 - June 5, 2010 at Denison University

We hosted 2 short courses for science faculty to learn more about computation in the framework of scientific teaching and research, and better position them for future work in their increasingly computational disciplines. Ideally, each participant will leave their short course having developed a module that can be used in one of their courses or their research and shared with others.

This proposal is a concrete outcome of the Mellon FCE workshop, "Computing and Mathematics Across the Sciences," held at Denison in June, 2009. Another goal of this project is to continue the fruitful conversations about interdisciplinary computation begun at that workshop.

Programming in R

Instructors: Daniel Kaplan (Math and Computer Science, Macalester College) and Matthew Landis (Biology, Middlebury College)

Programming in Python

Instructors: Elizabeth Sweedyk (Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College) and David Goodwin (Geosciences, Denison University)

This project was supported by grants from the Mellon Faculty Career Enhancement Initiative and the GLCA New Directions Initiative.