MRI: Acquisition of a Confocal Microscope for Multidisciplinary Resesarch and Teaching at an Undergraduate Liberal Arts College

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An award was made to Middlebury College to acquire a confocal microscope. This award provides the rural areas outside central Vermont with access to a key piece of modern research technology. Access to this instrument allows for enhanced education and research opportunities for students and faculty members at Middlebury College, as well as for colleagues from Castleton University and Norwich University. At Middlebury College, this microscope will be used in multiple courses across disciplines including biology, neuroscience, and physics, as well as in student-directed independent studies. This will expose almost a fourth of the entire student body to new, cutting-edge research technology. Within these disciplines, half of the students are women, nearly one fourth are of an ethnic minority, and over 15% are Pell grant recipients or first generation college students. This grant also supports a number of community outreach events and activities. Free and reduced lunch rates are as high as 56% in the communities surrounding Middlebury College, indicating substantial rural poverty. This poverty combined with low college-enrollment rates limits the access of many school-age children to high quality research and learning experiences. The confocal microscope made available by this award will enable Middlebury College to offer several new opportunities to educate and inspire local school-age children.This award also enables Middlebury and other regional faculty to pursue novel avenues of research, which were previously hampered or impossible. This award supports faculty across disciplines pursuing a wide range of research and education. In physics, a confocal microscope will allow faculty and students to employ a novel absorption-based imaging technique using the photothermal effect for contrast. In neuroscience, on-site access to a confocal microscope will allow faculty and student researchers mentored by accomplished faculty to investigate the development of the nervous system through multi- channel, high-resolution fluorescent immunohistochemistry and 3D reconstructions. This award also supports the pursuit of questions pertaining to the cellular response in neurons and glia to mechanical stress. The confocal microscope will allow Biology faculty to pursue questions involved in the regulation of vesicle release in C. elegans, memory formation in rats, and oocyte development. This award will improve undergraduate participation in advanced research by supporting a microscope that can rapidly colocalize multiple fluorescent labels from in-vivo and in-vitro specimens while providing an accessible user-interface for student learning. This will support the grantees’ mission to train the next generation of scientists and policy makers. This award enables novel research avenues pursued by undergraduate students and faculty, and results will be disseminated in peer-reviewed journals and at local, national, and international scientific conferences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.