CORE - Communications On increasing Research Efforts
A quarterly event/workshop series of interest to USciences faculty and graduate students. All CORE Sessions are sponsored by the Office of Research. Staff from the Office of Institutional Advancement and the Office of Sponsored Projects and Research will be in attendance at all meetings.
More Information
Funding questions:
Karen Mitchell
215.593.7491
Interest in moderating a discussion:
Dr. Shanaz Tejani-Butt
215.593.8594
Objectives of the CORE Initiative:
- Provide a mechanism for communication and collaboration between faculty and students with similar or overlapping interests
- Identify research strengths and interests among faculty
- Promote and expand ongoing research efforts and programs at USciences
- Identify suitable funding sources for faculty based upon specific research areas, interests, and expertise
- Foster faculty development and mentorship, particularly for junior faculty
- Support faculty in development of pilot or preliminary data for future grant submissions
CORE Intiaitive Calendar 2011 - 2012
| Date | Event | Location | Time |
4-Oct |
WI 205-208 |
Noon - 1pm |
|
17-Jan |
Richard McCourt, PhD** Division of Graduate Education |
STC 237
WI 201 |
Grad Stdts 10– 11:30am
Faculty |
9-Feb |
Technology Commercialization Presented by Executive Director
|
RH 101 |
1 - 2:30pm |
| 24-Apr | Tentative: Grant Writing Workshop | WI 205-208 | 1 -3:00pm |
**Richard McCourt, Phd
Dr. Rick McCourt is Associate Curator of Botany at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is currently a Program Director in DGE and works on the GK-12 and Graduate Research Fellowships Programs. He also served on the Interagency Working Group on Scientific Collections and co-authored a report on NSF-supported collections. He is on the working group for Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections at NSF (ADBC).
Dr. McCourt’s research is on the biodiversity, evolution, ecology, and systematics of green algae, specifically a group known as charophyte algae. These are the green algae that are the closest living algal relatives of land plants and include some well-known algae such as Spirogyra and stoneworts. He is working on reconstructing the phylogeny of these algae-that is, the evolutionary tree of green algae and land plants. A comprehensive phylogeny of green algae will help explain ancient evolutionary events that allowed the descendants of green algae to emerge from their habitats in freshwater ponds and diversify into the hundreds of thousands of species that live on land today. Dr. McCourt has conducted research on the ecology of intertidal algae in the Gulf of California, Sonora, Mexico. He studied habitat partitioning and phenology (seasonal patterns of growth and reproduction) of sympatric species of Sargassum, a large brown seaweed that occurs in huge floating masses in Atlantic gyres, as well as in subtidal and intertidal areas in the subtropics and tropics. He has also worked in historical botany, publishing a number of papers on the Lewis and Clark Herbarium at the Academy, and he co-authored with Earle E. Spamer a Special Publication CD-ROM and a short book on the Lewis and Clark Herbarium. Dr. McCourt has worked at the Academy since 1997. Before that he was an Associate Professor at DePaul University in Chicago, where he taught algal biology, aquatic biology, ecology, evolution, and introductory biology.
