What a society counts as moral or immoral is subject to the particular zeitgeist—the spirit of the times. “At the time of the slave trade, for example, most people who were slave owners thought it was moral. Even a few blacks, once they were freed, had slaves,” explains Sharon Welch, Professor of Religious Studies. As a social ethicist, Welch researches not just the way individuals make moral choices, but how a whole society begins to decide “what counts as moral.” To that effect, all of her projects coalesce around such issues of social morality.

Craig Kluever’s dream was born as he found himself awestruck in front of a grainy black-and-white television screen watching Apollo 11 land on the moon. He was in kindergarten. As he puts it, “that just made a big impact on me. Of course, the first thing I wanted to be was an astronaut.” Those early dreams of becoming an astronaut turned instead into a pursuit of the science behind the rockets. Today, the MU Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering works behind the scenes to solve the kind of problems involved in designing space travel—such as how to take off, how to reach a target, and, more importantly, how to return safely to Earth.

M. Heather Carver is framed by her clown shadow—a black mannequin head wearing a pink camouflage hat and red clown’s nose—as she joyfully begins to describe her place at MU. “I come from a background of performing,” the Associate Professor of Theatre offers. “As a means of studying something, we perform it.” As a way of studying autobiography, for example, Carver performs autobiography.

The fact that Nancy M. West finds herself focusing so heavily on the visual in her research and teaching may at first seem to be “a sort of a curious thing,” but for the associate professor of English this fascination for the visual extends all the way back to a childhood devoid of photographs. “I love thinking about what photography means to people. Having grown up with very few photographs in my household, I’ve always been drawn to them,” she admits. It was no surprise, therefore, that West stumbled upon her first book project while scrounging through the bargain bin of an antique store: “I came across all of these old Kodak ads from the turn of the century, and I thought they were amazing. The images were just breathtakingly beautiful. The captions were unlike those we see now in ads. They were much more elaborate, much more descriptive. They addressed the consumer in very interesting, clever ways, and I just fell in love with them.” And at that serendipitous moment, the idea for Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (2000) was conceived.

Bin Wu has been responding to real-world problems related to industrial systems design for twenty years. “When we talk about industrial system design,” he explains, “we are talking about how to put facilities, people, and information systems together so that this system can function for whatever purpose it was designed to serve,” whether to manufacture or to supply. Traditionally, says Wu, when designing an industrial system our main consideration was always productivity – how to produce or manufacture things more efficiently. Three years ago, however, the MU Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering received a wake-up call that changed the direction of his work.

So-Yeon Yoon admits that while she has always liked computer games, even as a young child, she has also always enjoyed painting and drawing. Yoon describes her watercolor paintings and how for her the creative process is “very addictive”: “I like colors and creating something beautiful, and creating things on the computer actually gives the same kind of fulfillment.” She is attracted to three-dimensional (3-D) images and experimenting with different textures and colors. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that Yoon found herself drawn to the field of architecture and interior design—“a perfect match” in which her creative desires and her interest in computers could merge. Today, the assistant professor of Architectural Studies focuses her research and teaching on the areas of Human Environmental Psychology and Interior and Architectural Design. Her current research combines information technology with interior design and architecture, a composite field in which she applies technology, particularly virtual reality (VR), to interior design problems.

Great celestial bodies populate the solar system. For an untrained eye staring at the heavens, the starlight spectacles and endless seas of blackness are nothing short of a miracle. Researchers, however, have developed mathematical equations that may help us understand such mysteries of the universe. From Isaac Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the scientific community has paved the way for a greater understanding of the great beyond.

Alex Barker wears several different hats in MU’s Department of Anthropology and the Museum of Art and Archaeology. One of these hats involves his research and fieldwork on the European Bronze Age and the ancient American southeast. The other involves the directorship of MU’s Museum of Art and Archaeology. Standing at the crossroads of several disciplinary fields, most of Barker’s field research has in recent years dealt with a single broad question: how social complexity grows out of egalitarian societies. His fieldwork in North America and the Old World follows this transition over different periods and regions.

The idea for SyndicateMizzou, if I recall the story correctly, arose during a lunch conversation involving two Center for eResearch personnel, founding director John Miles Foley and Information Technology Manager Jamie Stephens, shortly after the center was born in April 2005. “Wouldn’t it be great,” remarked the latter, “if there were a website that could syndicate diverse content, be fully searchable, and bring MU’s innovation, accomplishment, and expertise to the rest of the world?” It was initially over soup and sandwiches that this conversation grew into a conception of SyndicateMizzou—a website created to document and promote research and creative activity at the University of Missouri-Columbia. In fact, the trajectory from idea to reality provides a worthy case study for imagining and executing an online project.

The TigerPlace project is a collaboration across multiple departments of the MU campus. Listen to different team members introduce themselves and explain their involvement in the project.

Continuation of the research team introductions.

Devlin discussess how he goes about researching and gathering content for a new project.

Chandrasekhar’s research simply could not be accomplished without a good deal of collaboration with other people.

Finding a way to transform MU’s School of Journalism into a think tank for the news and advertising industry has been the main research goal for Esther Thorson, who serves as Professor, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, and Director of Research for the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Her first major effort, in collaboration with Margaret Duffy, was to address the news and advertising crisis caused by the “digital revolution,” reacting to the reality that newspaper and television audiences have been plummeting as consumers and advertisers alike are shifting toward the Internet and other new media technologies.

As the Missouri Coordinator for the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (SARE), Garcia tries to “keep the discussion on the table that Latino farmers (and other minority farmers) need to be more exposed to sustainable agriculture,” and he helps people better understand the need to reach out to those audiences. Garcia also serves on the steering committee for the National Immigrant Farming Initiative, a network of organizations across the country working with immigrant and refugee farmers (in Missouri that means Latino and Hmong workers).

Garcia has been conducting research on Latino farmers and their access to financial services, an extension project that became integrated with a research project.

In order to understand the complexities of these legal issues, Wells monitors state legislatures in terms of bills that have been enacted, examining the history of the legislative debates that ensued as the law was being passed. She obtains this information through governmental websites and through the Westlaw database, but she also looks at newspaper articles that describe the protests and even requests documents (such as complaints, depositions, and affidavits) from the attorneys involved to see how the demonstrations are described and what reasons are given for challenging a particular law.

Craig Kluever’s childhood dream of becoming an astronaut turned instead into the pursuit of the science behind the rockets. Today, the Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering seeks to solve the kind of problems involved in space missions—like how to take off, and most importantly, how to return safely to Earth. Kluever came to this area of research in graduate school when he had a fellowship with NASA, developing computer programs to help solve problems involved with mission designs that use electric propulsion (as opposed to chemical propulsion). At the time, Kluever recalls, electric propulsion was a brand new technology, and NASA needed predictive computer models to calculate missions, for example to map a trajectory from Earth to Mars using electric propulsion.

Humanities-related research involves studying the work of other scholars (e.g., philosophy and comparative religious ethics) and then synthesizing those ideas. For example, Welch has taken up the challenge to dominant ethics by Native American and Engaged Buddhist philosophers. Using certain techniques like interactive theatre in the classroom, she is applying qualitative measures to determine the effect of these pedagogical techniques. So far she has learned that these interactive theatre experiences can really change the way many students see the world around them.

Heather Carver describes herself as “a performance studies artist/scholar,” someone who investigates an issue through performance—“so we study autobiography, and we do autobiographical performance.” Carver teaches several kinds of creative writing, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, in adaptation and performance of literature for theatre and the screen. She also co-directs the Writing for Performance Program, which helps students adapt different kinds of writing for the stage or screen, including poetry, short stories, autobiography, or ethnography. And Carver serves as creator and artistic director of the Life and Literature Performance series to showcase original and adapted work by MU students for the stage.

With her first book, West’s motivation came from a personal source: “What could be more personal than a photograph, especially when my childhood contained so few of them?” “To be totally honest,” she says, “my second book was very hard for me, and I think one reason was because crime books are discussed so much. How to make an original intervention really worried me.” West reflects on her motivation for working on her third book: “I think it’s about the anticipation of watching all those Masterpiece Theatre episodes with my mom. I know that sounds corny, but it’s really true!”

The teaching honors awarded to West bear witness to her pedagogical skills, including the Gold Chalk Award (1999, 2005), the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching (2004), and the English Graduate Student Association’s inaugural award for Outstanding Graduate Faculty Member (2005). Reflecting on her teaching, West states: “I really believe in interdisciplinary work—not just to present students with a reference every once in a while to an artistic or scientific movement, but to really see things from inside those disciplines. I think there are very rich connections to be made, and so I try to get students thinking in interdisciplinary ways.”

Collaboration has been at the forefront of West’s research from the beginning. Although collaboration is said to take twice a long as working on something by yourself, West reports “I’ve always thought it was really sad in some ways to be an academic, working so much in isolation. Questions arise, such as ‘whom am I writing this for, how many people are going to read it, and what social good am I doing?’ For me collaboration helps alleviate some of those anxieties about the usefulness of the work. Whenever I get anxious, I can turn to my co-author and ask, ‘Why are we doing this project again, and why is it important?’ We can sort of borrow each other’s energies at different times. There is truly that spirit of doing it together—a joint venture.” In this spirit, West has collaborated on a number of conference papers and articles with graduate students and other colleagues because she finds that collaboration pushes her in different ways. For example, working with Pelizzon, with whom she wrote From Celluloid to Tabloid, challenged West to be a better writer. “She is a wonderful stylist,” says West of her poet collaborator, so that “whenever I write a sentence and revise it, I wonder if it is a sentence she would like, or how I could make it better. She also tells great narratives, knows how to tweak anecdotes really well, and knows how to make a critical book read like a narrative, which is a real gift.”

Reflecting on “the ways in which personal interests affect the professional and how personal motivation often guides professional motivation,” West recalls a story about how she chose her career. “When I was in college at Rutgers University, I thought I would go to law school…. I was very committed to that…. Then one day it was career day, and a lawyer came and talked about her work. She looked so beleaguered and so unimpassioned. And she was followed by an English professor, who totally enchanted me. And that was it! I already had the law school applications and thought, ‘I can’t do this,’ and I told my professors. This was at one of the moments when the job market was just awful, and they told me, ‘Don’t do it…. You’re not going to be able to get a job in English. You’re just going to waste your time. You’re just going to end up really sad and disappointed. Don’t do it.’ I just thought this is a part of who I am. I just had an instinct that it was going to be okay. So I did it and I never regretted it.” Because of this life-changing moment, West tells students curious about pursuing English in graduate school, “You have a really hard road in front of you in terms of the job market, and there is a good chance that you won’t find a job right away. But if this is who you are, if it is part of your being, if you can’t imagine yourself not doing it, then you really don’t have a choice, do you?”

Chicone discusses the fundamental importance of mathematics for the natural world, observing that mathematics serves an array of practical purposes. He gives the example of one of his students, who freezes tissue for a project in cryobiology. The researchers working on this project are using mathematical models to make predictions about the behavior of living cells.

As a researcher at MU, Chicone spends a large portion of his time working with students. As an instructor involved with both graduate and undergraduate students, Chicone says that he learns a great deal from those he teaches.

Bin Wu, Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, has been researching, teaching, and consulting within the field of industrial engineering for twenty years. “When we talk about industrial system design,” he explains, “we are talking about how to put facilities, people, and information systems together so that this system can function for whatever purpose it is designed to fulfill – for example, to manufacture or to supply. Traditionally, when we designed a system, the main efficiency considerations were related to productivity.” About three years ago, however, Wu received a wake-up call: his son’s birth created a sense of urgency to address environmental issues, and specifically energy efficiency. He realized then that when designing and improving systems, particularly industrial systems, “energy has got to be a very important consideration, if not the most important consideration.”

Following years principally involved in research, Wu now spends more time working with both students and the public on energy efficiency and the environment. As he puts it, “I feel very strongly that every one of us needs to do something and behave in responsible ways, individually or collectively, [to] do something about it.” As an educator, Wu gets the message out to his students, who he says are the future: , “It’s really a very fulfilling thing to do. I have been a professor for all of my professional life—doing research, writing books and other publications, and teaching. I can honestly say that what I’m doing now regarding energy efficiency is absolutely the most fulfilling.”

Because of her lifelong interests, So-Yeon Yoon was drawn to the field of architecture and interior design. It was “a perfect match,” one in which her creative desires and her interest in computers could merge. Today, this assistant professor of Architectural Studies teaches focuses her research and teaching on the areas of Human Environmental Psychology and Interior and Architectural Design. Yoon’s current research combines information technology with interior design and architecture. That is, she applies technology, particularly virtual reality (VR), to interior design problems.

Almost all of Barker’s field research in Romania focuses on a single broad question: how does society go from the sovereign individual to the individual sovereign?
Barker is trying to understand the relationship between that process and the economics underlying those societies, seeking answers to questions about the economic basis of political change, and the development of economic mechanisms like taxation and charity relief, as well as why people would be willing to forsake their rights as autonomous individuals for more autocratic control by some kind of hierarchy. Barker surmises that individuals must have somehow perceived themselves as benefiting from the change.

The Center for the Studies in Oral Tradition, founded in 1986 by John Miles Foley, became the model for the Center for eResearch. The mission of the CeR is to bring together people from diverse fields doing innovative research on Internet or digital projects so that they might profit from the exchange of ideas.

Founder and director John Miles Foley explains the thinking behind the creation of SyndicateMizzou, with its mission to make research and creative activity occurring at MU accessible to the public on a 24/7/365 basis.

When asked about why they were drawn to this area of research or creative activity, MU faculty provide interesting and compelling responses. In some cases, they continued in school because the drive to learn new things was so great, because family provided a sense of identity and career direction, or because of initial interest in a related field. In other cases, they stumbled upon the field quite by accident. Regardless of the reason, the passion they hold for their work is obvious.

Whether their work seeks to counter domestic violence and ethnic genocide, identify cancer treatments, or employ literature and music to understand humanity, these MU faculty describe in their own words why this work is important to society.

In this segment, faculty members talk about how their research and creative activity contribute to better teaching, as well as the relationship between these two aspects of their work. Frequently, the two endeavors intersect, profitting both. Carmen Chicone remarks, “If you are actively involved in your subject, you’re bound to be a much better teacher.”