University of Missouri
AC-10: Support for Research

The Office of Undergraduate Research was established to:

Facilitate collaboration among existing undergraduate research programs;
Promote undergraduate research to internal and external audiences;
Encourage new initiatives to create and enhance undergraduate research opportunities.
Unlike most classroom experiences, undergraduate research programs at Mizzou allow students to explore the unknown through hands-on work with faculty mentors. Research opportunities exist for all three components of sustainability.

Undergraduate Research Teams
The Undergraduate Research Team program seeks to create broadly interdisciplinary learning communities — comprised of faculty mentors and undergraduate students — working together on a problem-based research project. Solving big societal problems will require the expertise of more than one discipline. The program inspires “out of the box” collaborations among typically unrelated fields of study and offers students transferable problem-solving skills, content knowledge, a peer learning experience and a mentoring relationship between faculty and students.

Some examples include:

Food for the Future
--The Life of the Garden: Exploring the Maturation of Gardens from Literary & Botanical Perspectives
--Food for Thought: Food, Body Image & the Media
--Burgundy Truffle Cultivation in Missouri: A Food-based Catalyst for Transformational Development of Rural Economies
--Waste Not, Want Not interdisciplinary food waste intervention team

Sustainable Energy
--Linkages between Rainfall, Runoff and Sediment Transport
--Stormwater Best Management Practices Monitoring

Mizzou Advantage acts as a facilitator to faculty research and provides grants and aid in order to identify competitive assets that set MU apart from other universities. These assets underlie four dynamic initiatives that collectively are called the Mizzou Advantage.

-Sustainable Energy
-Food for the Future
-Media of the Future
-One Health, One Medicine

The purpose of Mizzou Advantage is to increase MU’s visibility and stature in higher education and to strengthen these areas:

-Quality of faculty and students
-Instructional programs
-Value of an MU degree
-Success of grant proposals
-Fundraising results
-U.S. and Missouri economies
-Venture-capital investment

A network of collaborators — faculty members, centers, departments, corporate partners and other universities — will drive activities related to each competitive asset. MU has a $6 million annual financial plan to increase the impact of those collaborators, whose efforts will result in more grants and opportunities to recruit the most prominent scholars and scientists. Not only will Mizzou Advantage contribute to MU’s status in higher education, it will create jobs and improve the quality of life for Missourians.

MU establishes myriad opportunities for collaboration across campus. By focusing on real-world problems, our networks secure external funding, recruit top students, attract prominent scholars and scientists, create jobs and improve the quality of life for people throughout the world.

Interdisciplinary research is MU’s hallmark. Examples of first-rate collaborative environments include the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, the Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center, the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Health Activity Center. Since its inception in 2009, Mizzou’s Interdisciplinary Innovations Fund has awarded more than $400,000 in grants to support student-centered interdisciplinary projects that use information technology to develop innovative approaches to teaching, research and service. MU is one of only five universities nationwide with law, medicine, veterinary medicine and a nuclear research reactor on one campus, fostering collaboration among departments and programs.

From Rachel Brekhus, reference librarian at Ellis Library:

"It's (sustainability) an interdisciplinary field, so of course we support it in so far as we support those departments who engage in teaching and research in those courses identified as supporting sustainability, but normally, units that have a dedicated library fund assigned to them are departments or colleges. In the field of History, for instance, our purchasing includes material on environmental history, but those resources are purchased on our History fund. Our large interdisciplinary databases, like Scopus, Academic Search Complete, JSTOR, etc., index and sometimes provide full text for journals dealing with sustainability topics. We are also a state and a federal depository library, so we receive all federal government documents produced by the EPA and other agencies doing work in sustainability, as well as all such documents published by the state of Missouri, e.g., by the Missouri Department of Conservation.

The main URL describing library support for sustainability is: http://libraryguides.missouri.edu/sustainability.

However, if you do a search for the word "sustainable" on the general library guides website, http://libraryguides.missouri.edu, you will see no fewer than 39 library guides supporting specific course and disciplines with some level of focus on sustainability. For example, you'll see a library guide for an undergraduate General Honors class on "Green Engineering/Sustainable Energy," a subject guide on Rural Sociology, where some work on sustainable agriculture, ecotourism etc. is done, a guide put together by the Engineering librarian containing core resources on Sustainable Development in particular."

Also see:

http://mizzouadvantage.missouri.edu/energy/