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- In 2014, the University of Wyoming decided to make a push intending to earn recognition as a top tier R1 research University in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.

In March UW cut the ribbon on the physical centerpiece of that drive, the new science initiative building price tag 100 million dollars.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

We'll look around the new building and talk to two professors instrumental in its development and operation.

Say hello to the new UW Science Initiative Building.

Coming up now on Wyoming Chronicle.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is made possible in part by, the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

ThinkWY.org and by the members of the Wyoming PBS foundation.

Thank you for your support.

(upbeat music) - So walk through the building think of this plant and think about what this plant it's gonna look like.

A gigantic douglas fir.

(audience laughing) That dominates the landscape, academic landscape for the Rocky Mountain Region.

That's our goal here and that serves this state in terms of its core needs and that's what I mean by our niche mission.

We can't do everything in all academic areas equally well, we've gotta pick what are our strong parts and we've gotta build strength on strength.

That's how we'll develop this literally world class reputation.

- Welcome.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come today to celebrate the opening of this amazing new facility of the Science Initiative Building.

My name is Mark Lyford.

I'm thrilled to be here today and I'm truly honored to be a part of the science initiative team.

To take the core sciences at the University of Wyoming, to what we refer to as top tier status.

You'll see firsthand how this facility is actually designed to meet the goals of the science initiative.

It's gonna support a whole new era of teaching, research and service that's gonna support our state.

- [Jeffry] It takes a while for these things to come together, but I think most importantly, once the facility's here and what we look for is you'd indicated it earlier is the transformational things that can happened with our students which is really kind of paramount to many of us.

- [Dave] And we ended up with a proposal that we were proud to take back to the legislature.

Well, when I write my memoirs this building exists because of my amazing contribution, but hey, the truth is that this thing probably would've fallen apart if it hadn't been through Greg Brown.

The star of the show has to be Greg Brown.

- We're going faster than the board of trustee.

You wanna go to the greenhouse now?

- Sure.

- Okay let's go.

- This is the best one I've ever seen and I've been a botanist for 35 years and I've been to quite a few major greenhouse collections in North America, but also Europe and one in South America at the Rio Botanical Garden for instance.

We kill the rest of them with this.

This is so good.

- We're here now with professor Greg Brown at the dedication ceremonies of the new science initiative building at the University of Wyoming and Laramie.

What is your position relative to this structure?

- I've been appointed the executive operations director for the science initiative building.

- So you were on faculty when the announcement that this push for the Tier 1 R1 recognition was going to be made and have been part of that from the beginning.

- From the very first day that's correct.

- What does it mean to be in the executive position that you have?

- Well, my job is basically to implement policy to make sure that this building which is very complex and supports not just research, but also so education and service to the state.

Make sure that mission is achieved appropriately and that the space is not misused.

- And remarks you made earlier today.

I heard you specifically mention a couple of times the concept, the presumably becoming outmoded concept of what you you call the Sage on the stage.

What does that mean?

- Well, that goes back to the active learning class where you have for instance I've done that most of my career.

Where I've had as many of 500 students in one of my lecture classes for General Biology.

I walk into the room literally on a stage and give them a lecture for 15 minutes and walk out.

It's very passive learning.

Students are sitting there doing, who knows what.

Some are taking notes, but many are not actively engaged in the lecture.

They leave, but they're not really learning anything.

- And you can't tell from your position who was taking notes, who was learning, who wasn't?

- Exactly, yeah.

- Though traditionally and another faculty have confirmed this.

The students that sit in the very front of the room are the ones that are engaged and dedicated and they're also the ones that get the A's and B's in the class.

- Well, this is intended to get more of them into that higher achieving group among other objectives I'm sure.

- Yeah, and that's why this building has that active learning classroom facility where as Dr. Lyford has noted for one thing, the attendance in those classes goes way up from 60 to 70% on average once the class gets started to 96, 98%.

(upbeat music) - I took college biology intro to biology a lifetime ago at the University of Wyoming in the old Aven Nelson Building.

I believe it was.

And it was what we had, It was what we expected.

There was a very able professor at the front of the room.

What would be the experience of a introductory biology student say this fall, taking that class in this facility be?

- Well, that's a great question that was going to a large classroom of 200 plus students.

This room, as opposed to those spaces at more kind of a tiered lecture hall.

Where you as a student were pretty much a passive listener lectured at by your faculty member, very able but what we now know is how students learn lecturing is not an effective means for students to learn.

In the reality is we realize now the evidence is totally clear students just learning through lecture are not successful.

Students need to be engaged in their own learning and we do that through something we call active learning.

Whole ton of suite of activities you can do for active learning.

So can range from students working on problem sets together, can work on students maybe working to demonstrate that they understand a concept by developing an illustration that could be in a textbook, could be a large problem like well, figure out how much renewable energy would we need if we wanna replace 25% of our fossil fuels.

A whole range of activities.

Think about trying to do those things in a large tiered lecture hall.

Very difficult, but a space like this much easier.

- Well we're here I know in a part of the facility that excites you very much, it's just a big empty room.

What's so great about it?

What's going to be so great about it?

- What's gonna be so great about it is on the first day of class is this fall, there'll be 204 students in here and there'll be students ranging from that introductory biology class you took to chemistry, to organic chemistry, to human systems physiology.

And as you see a very different style classroom that faculty who are now teaching through active learning, who are trained in a program we provide called LAMP the Learning Actively Mentoring Program, even in those tier lecture halls, not just lecturing, we're seeing those students be more successful.

The number of students who get a D or an F or just withdrew from the class has gone down significantly.

Coming to a space like this and now giving faculty access to a space that will allow them to do the whole range of active learning.

We're gonna see even greater increases in student success and that's what it's all about.

That's my passion about this from the sciences.

We realize research is absolutely critical and it too is an important role in our students education but the biggest impact we can have early on are students who are in these large introductory courses like biology, chemistry, physics which are often seen as high risk courses.

Probably were back then too right?

So we provide a very different opportunity for our faculty and our students to help them be successful.

- People see a facility like this they think this is where the PhD students get to study.

This is where the grad students are.

This is where the outside researchers are.

This is where the faculty members are locked up in the lab.

But your point is, everybody gets to use it including the freshmen English major who needs to take a science credit.

- Absolutely, Yeah.

And that's what's great about this building and frankly about the science initiative we focused on student success.

And I would say that this space right here and the conversation we had about student success particularly in these classrooms is really what helps sell the idea of the science initiative as people get it right?

And the impact, the thousands of students each year that will come through this space that we can help be successful will be just be huge.

- In some of the reading I was doing preparing for today, things that don't strike the layman.

One of them was the sound and I don't know if it's accurate to say it's a sound system but the concept of the lecture on a stage with a microphone and people or not a microphone, people stress straining to hear that's not going to be a problem here.

Why?

- Yeah, so this I would say in part answer, this is probably the largest most sophisticated active in classroom in the nation.

And one of those things is because of the technology here.

you don't see it but they're are speakers throughout the ceiling and there's microphones throughout the ceiling throughout the entire space.

What's great about the sound system that's in this very sophisticated in fact in a back room there's a basically it looks like a mainframe.

It's a huge system.

And what it allows as a faculty member who's teaching to basically walk through the room, speaking in a normal voice and those microphones will pick them up as they travel throughout.

So the students can hear them.

What it also allows is when we want students to be working in groups and talking you can imagine like a high school cafeteria that can get pretty boisterous and loud.

What this system also does is allows students to talk at a space.

It then deadens the sounds from the groups next to them.

So those can work in isolation and not be disturbed so much by the groups next to them.

Then it allows the faculty member to say, " Okay, Johnny your group's got a great idea here.

Why don't you share that?"

And then that table can speak up at normal speaking level and it'll be amplified across the room.

So it's gonna be incredible.

- So it makes it easier for everybody.

The professor, the lecture, speaker can be more relaxed.

The students aren't training to hear.

It's more of a conversational kind of approach and that's part of the active learning model I take.

- Exactly.

It basically comes down to you.

You're not tethered to a lecture.

You're not tethered to a lecture that has a microphone.

- Is some of this realization of how students learn better tied to the COVID experience?

In that all this off it was the presumption was made that because you're not in a classroom the conventional classroom you're learning on your own.

It must be worse, but that's not always proved to be true.

Has it?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

I would say its a challenge and it was a challenge in making that change quick.

But one of the key things about active learning and frankly learning in general is not all the learning takes place in the classroom and most of the learning takes place outside of the classroom.

And what we learned from COVID, was faculty had to learn how to use the systems to be teaching online and lot of those tools that are used for online teaching we can be using in the classroom.

So a case in point, rather than me lecturing for 15 minutes on a concept to the class in person, they could listen to a short lecture prior to their class time, they could do a short assessment to see do they understand the content we're talking about?

Do they understand the concept?

I could check that before they come to class, but they come to class ready to go.

So there's all sorts of tools.

Actually I think that COVID was a blessing in that sense that were available to us before but not fully utilized.

- Because you didn't have to.

- Didn't have to.

- But now once you did have to, it's more of a matter of well, thank goodness we can get back to the way we used to do things.

In fact, there are things from that difficult experience that we ought to keep using.

- Absolutely.

I think it will further help us transform how we do our teaching for students not only in this space, but as they're out in their dorm room or apartment preparing for class.

- Tell us again what the name of this room is.

- Well, so it's an Active Learning Classroom ALC.

We love acronyms in the science initiative.

So the ALC and really truly hallmark for this facility and what's great it wasn't an add-on.

This building was based on largely how are we gonna serve the whole frankly how do we serve the mission of the university?

And I think this building is a great example.

It's all about research.

It's all about teaching and it's all about service and outreach.

And so I think we try to think about all those things as we put this plan together.

- First classes will be taught when?

- This fall and the room will be filled 24/7.

(upbeat music) - Both professor Brown and professor Lyford were busy most of the morning leading tours through the new facility.

They found time later to speak with Wyoming Chronicle together in one of the new research laboratories.

Dr. Brown, Dr. Lyford.

Thanks for being with us on Wyoming Chronicle today.

I guess you guys are having a pretty good day today aren't you?

- It's a great day.

Yeah It's a great day.

Have this ceremony building opened and kind of a hallmark point in the evolution of this whole program.

- I recall as a young man applying for college and having to fill out an essay question, which was, tell us in your own words, what college is about.

And I remember launching immediately into the cliche of well it's more than the books in the library and the collection of buildings and that is true.

College educate is more than buildings, but this building is really something isn't it?

- Well, this building is probably the highest tech most modern research education facility in the Rocky Mountain Region as of today.

And there's been a parallel change in science even during my career where for many many years traditional academic science was done by one lead principal investigator at a university, one faculty member and whoever might have been in his lab or her group grad students or undergrads, but now what's happening because the big questions of science are very interdisciplinary even my own most recent publication involved zoologist, a person with GIS experience geographer basically and a couple other biologists not just botanists.

And those are things that never would've happened 20 years ago at all but it's even gotten bigger.

If a person looks at publications, peer reviewed publications they'll see any more they're almost anywhere are from five to 25 co-authors and that's because of this big interdisciplinary requirement because one person can't know or be an expert in all the complexities that that question addresses.

- Is that just because it's more than just, we wanna do more science because this is what we do or is it partly because the problems of science, the things we're asking science to do are just bigger than they used to be and the demands are greater and the solutions are more important.

- Yeah I think that the things we face today across the globe are gonna require much more integrated interdisciplinary collaborative work.

- And we're talking about practical things such as energy and climate change and- - How to feed more people, how to reclaim land that have been damaged.

I mean it just goes on and on.

It gets you more complex and things like medical research as well.

- I mean we've just been through of course are still in to extent the whole coronavirus crisis in the country, which looked to science as the the savior of the situation and to a large extent found it.

This is the sort of scale of the problem that we're talking about that a facility like this can help us solve.

- Right because these large interdisciplinary research groups can involve people like social scientists, criminologists.

I mean its just economic professors who understand the economic side of the ramifications of the work.

- The building is part of a university-wide initiative that began some years ago to elevate the university to a status known as Tier 1 or R1.

What does that mean exactly?

What is an R1 university have that the university of Wyoming didn't have when this initiative began?

- Well, we're currently R2.

Universities are classified in an R status and R1 is the top.

These are the top research universities and what it means is that they secure on a per capita basis.

So it's not biased by university size.

The external grant funding from the outside for research, the number of individuals that are supported or funded by that research in an important metric and in very important metric are how many graduate students particularly PhD students are graduated, but also there's an undergraduate research component as well.

And that's what this facility will do.

It's not just faculty that will work in this room, but it's graduate students of masters PhD and then in our Wyoming research scholars program, undergraduate students will have access to these labs.

- It's education obviously, it's science, it's research, teaching, learning, but from what you just said, there's an economic component.

It's a job builder.

It could be looked at that way right?

- Yeah and that's a new thing that's challenging us as well.

One of those culture shifts that not only the building brings, but you know how we think about the future it's for our faculty I mean it's for our students.

Our students come up with ideas we don't, they're actually building their own business.

There's a developing 'em but we need to provide more education on that for our students and more opportunities for our own students to actually collaborate together in some of the spaces in this building to be thinking about how do we help Wyoming advance economically?

And what are some things we can do?

What have they learned from their research?

So it's an exciting time and I think there's a lot of opportunity to have connections with industry in and business partners which are already in development in the building.

- So who says we are in an R1 institution?

how is that determined?

Is it declare it yourself finally?

Or there is an accreditation or evaluation process I presume?

- There's a accreditation process.

It's done every five years.

UW just went through it last year and it's done by the Carnegie Institute.

So it's standard nationwide.

- And it's fair and you agree with it and the standards that are said are ones that are reasonable and worthy to achieve.

- Yes and it's fair simply because it's done on a per capita basis, because if it was not there's no way we can compete with some of the really large institutions that have four times the number of faculty that we have here.

- Is there one nearest?

Is there an R1 institution in the Rocky Mountain Region, for example?

The mountain time zone?

- Yeah, the University of Colorado is an R1 university but they're also much larger.

- So the fact that the building was the ribbon was cut today and the building was dedicated and we're now sitting here in it, that in and of itself does not make us an R1 institution.

What more is there to do in the coming years?

- Well, that's the exciting part of it and I think we're in a good position particularly with the administration we have now.

Really values where we're headed with science and engineering both the engineering initiative and the science initiative and I think we're in a good position to move forward and in a very thoughtful way, think about how do we reach that R1 status and to do so based on what do we do well now and how do we strengthen what we do well now.

- My videographer, Matt and I have been looking around for a couple of hours this morning.

There's more here than we could see in a couple of days.

You two probably know the building as well or better than anybody.

Dr. Brown what are a couple of things about it specifically that really excites you as an educator, a researcher.

- One as a botanist, the greenhouse facility is literally probably the best in the country.

- On the roof right?

- On the roof yes.

Upward gets the most light possible and it has some very high end control systems for the abiotic parts of the element like atmosphere, temperature, humidity, and even in the growth chamber part of the facility we can control light not only the amount of light, but the quality in terms of wavelength of light.

So it will allow the research is up there to do experiments that simply could not have been done at all and it's top of the line.

- Dr. Lyford you told us this morning in opening remarks that one of the important objectives for the building was not to build a space and then see what other existing programs we could move in here and start filling it up.

It's a different concept.

What about it specifically to you as an educator really fires you up about the active learning process?

- So we've learned that we have to do things very differently and engage students in their learning.

And when they're engaged in their learning, they're much more successful.

The DF withdrawal rate goes down significantly in classes.

They come to class, they graduate in more timely manner, all kinds of benefits for our students.

This building has that new space that we don't have on campus and it'll be transformational.

The other thing that excites me about, and it goes to the research.

We realize active learning and in the classroom is great but the ultimate form of active learning is research.

And so our Wyoming research scholars program that Dr. Brown mentioned is and has been will continue to be a truly transformational experience for our students.

- Tell us a bit more about that program.

- Yeah, so the ability for a student even a freshman to come in and work one-on-one highly mentored program with our research faculty and this building and frankly a across campus, across most departments and colleges across campus.

Those students get basically graduate level experiences as an undergrad.

And those are the experiences that really can turn a student on to the major.

Lots of data shows that if a student's in these research projects they stay, they're more successful in classes and their time to graduation is less.

And it's basically science isn't simply knowing science is doing.

- This isn't the only new science facility that's been built on campus relative to the push to become the R1 university.

Could UW achieve it without this building?

How important is it?

- I think it's essential and that's another reason a couple years ago they finished the new ERB building for engineering.

You're not gonna attract the kind of faculty and certainly graduate students that are are needed as the core workforce to achieve R1 status with some of the really old physical facilities we have and the older buildings on campus.

- When you're doing a building you see a plan, you find the money and you build it and you're through with it.

But the continuing effort related to the program, the faculty is crucial as well.

I imagine of course that is an ongoing part of what the university and you and others will have to impress upon a new group of legislators for example a new group of administrators at the building is here but it's the continuing effort that makes the programs work, right?

- Yeah that's a great question and a really important point.

The purpose of this building is to really facilitate that interdisciplinary cross-disciplinary work which are the problems we're facing, right?

Which are also what the funding agencies are providing funding for.

So I think this building also allows the sorts of research that's gonna be funded in the future and that helps us also bring us to R1.

But if we don't support that work through programs like a C grant program, through programs like more PhD students to help with that, we won't get there.

So the ongoing programs are what really I think are different about the science initiative.

And again beyond just a building, new buildings are great, this facility is phenomenal, but if we just don't support the faculty and the students with these programs, similar to the active learning classroom, if we don't continue to train faculty on how do you actually teach through act learning we won't achieve our goals.

- R1, PhD students, researchers, graduate students, visiting researchers, all a big part of what this is, but in doing some reading about it before we came today, there's a K12 element for the littlest kids in Wyoming schools.

Tell us a about that, Dr. - Oh thanks for bringing that up.

So one of the other programs we have beyond our you know, training faculty to use active learning, our Wyoming research scholars program is what we call our K through community roadshow.

And one of the things we realize is if we wait till the college experience to try and influence kids students to be in stem were way too late.

And so we have a program that gets out and works with K through 12 teachers, and students brings in fact active learning engaging opportunities across all the disciplines out to the schools and Greg and I have a saying that is if we can't do this in Wyoming it can't be done anywhere.

That is we can touch K through 12 community college, UW, truly the K through community and have a lasting impact and that's our goal.

So we've got a director of our K through community roadshow that is actively working with students here on campus.

So we have student that are our assistants they go out and bring these engaging opportunities to the school systems.

- We've been speaking today with professors, Greg Brown and mark Lyford of the University of Wyoming on the great occasion for them the unveiling and dedication of the new University of Wyoming Science Initiative Building.

Thanks to both of you for being with us today on Wyoming Chronicle.

- Thank you.

(upbeat music)