Dr. Virginia Edwards

Virginia B. Edwards, PhD, passed away on November 9, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was 89. Dr. Edwards retired from the English faculty. She loved teaching and she loved West Virginia State University.

Visitation will be held at 11 a.m. followed by a memorial service at Noon on Saturday, November 20 at Keller Funeral Home in Dunbar.

WVSU Receives Additional $3 Million in NSF Research Grants

West Virginia State University (WVSU) has taken another broad step in raising its level of distinction as an 1890 Land-Grant research institution.  Through the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC) and the West Virginia Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), WVSU was awarded two separate National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.

“The University community is excited for the opportunity to participate in this important educational initiative,” says Dr. Orlando F. McMeans, Special Assistant to the President for Research & Public Service.  “Both grants will provide our research faculty and students with state- of- the- art computational and biotechnology equipment and infrastructure necessary for advancing the University’s research mission.” 

The first award, which was received just last year, is a three-year $577,000 total grant award and its main focus is to increase cyberinfrastructure for research on campus. Officially titled as “Cyberinfrastrucure for Transformational Scientific Discovery,” the grant will allow WVSU to invest in advanced computing technologies and increase the campus local area network (LAN) capacity from one gigabyte to ten gigabytes in bandwidth. 

The high performance computing and visualization environment, made possible by the funding, will allow WVSU scientists to collaborate in real time over the Internet with other researchers around the state and the country and to share valuable research data.  Work is already underway at WVSU to increase the LAN capacity and developing a high performance computing and a visualization room.

WVSU is also proud to announce its most recent NSF’s Research Infrastructure Improvement award.  Once again in conjunction with the WV HEPC and WV EPSCoR, WVSU has been awarded approximately $2.5 million as part of a five-year, $20 million NSF Bionanotechnology for Public Security and Environmental Safety grant, along with Marshall and West Virginia Universities.

As a main focus to increase institutional research capacity, this grant will be used to acquire state of the art research equipment and to fund a new faculty position in Bioinformatics along with start-up funds. This new faculty member will be in charge of the high performance computing and visualization room being pursued through the cyber infrastructure grant.  Additionally, funds will be used to support three junior and five senior faculty members in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics as well the Gus R. Douglass Institute.  Students will also benefit from this grant as four graduate research assistantships and support for at least five undergraduate research fellowships are being funded. 

As for the science behind this increased research capacity, WVSU intends to focus efforts on an emerging proposed area on cell development and signaling in plant, animal and microbial life. Additionally, the educational outreach portion of this grant, which focuses on science technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), provides resources to support programming designed to attract youth to careers in STEM related fields. The University will deliver biotechnology training to K-12 students and teachers.  Teachers will be certified to become trainers themselves in STEM technologies. Additionally, support for recruiting, educating, retaining and graduating undergraduates in the STEM fields will be a key focus.

For more information on these funding awards, contact Dr. Orlando F. McMeans at the WVSU Douglass Institute at (304) 766-4290.