NSF Funds Undergraduate Research Experience at the University of Texas

The NSF has funded a $300,000 REU site at the University of Texas at Austin for the State of Texas, based on a proposal submitted by Professor Sriram Vishwanath and Professor William Bard. This project will provide undergraduates in the state with unparalleled research opportunities in communications and networking. Students will be paid stipends that rival graduate student salaries while working on advanced research concepts with the faculty at The University of Texas. Students from many Universities within Texas will be recruited to participate in the program, exposing these students to cutting edge research and giving them to opportunity to be part of the wireless networking and communications revolution. Roughly half the student participants will be selected from within The University of Texas at Austin.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG), with sixteen professors and five labs, forms the foundation for this project. The EURECA team includes faculty and staff from WNCG and educational research specialists from the Faculty Innovation Center.

Dr. Vishwanath explains, "The 1998 Boyer report found the near-absence of research from undergraduate curricula throughout the Nation to be a serious deficiency in our education system. The EURECA program represents UT's response to this find, exposing young Texans from different walks of life to cutting edge research in wireless, thus enabling them to become tomorrow's leaders in the field."

The undergraduate research projects have been designed to provide participants with a gamut of options. A key component of this research project is its “extensibility” – providing students with the capacity to build on knowledge provided to them by EURECA faculty to generate independent results, and to sustain this effort after returning to their parent institutions. The EURECA team’s objective is to generate sustained research interest among undergraduates so that they become tomorrow’s leaders in industry and academia.

UT Austin is one of the premier research institutions in the nation, and the faculty members constituting the EURECA team have extensive experience both performing and conducting research. Many faculty members in this team also have considerable experience working with undergraduates from across institutions. The research projects in the EURECA endeavor have been created as a focused plan to guide the student from a passive learning state to the state of being an active self-sustaining researcher.