{"id":28203,"date":"2023-10-04T11:54:05","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T15:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=28203"},"modified":"2023-10-04T13:03:58","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T17:03:58","slug":"300000-nsf-mri-grant-awarded-to-furman-mount-holyoke-college-university-of-richmond-to-expand-program-for-young-chemists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/300000-nsf-mri-grant-awarded-to-furman-mount-holyoke-college-university-of-richmond-to-expand-program-for-young-chemists\/","title":{"rendered":"$300,000 NSF MRI grant awarded to Furman, Mount Holyoke, Richmond to expand program for young chemists"},"content":{"rendered":"

George C. Shields<\/a> of Furman University, Maria A. Gomez<\/a> of Mount Holyoke College and Carol A. Parish<\/a> of the University of Richmond have been awarded a $300,000 NSF Major Research Instrumentation<\/a> Program grant to expand computing resources and student training capacity for MERCURY<\/a>, the Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate computational chemistRY, established by Shields in 2001 with co-founders Gomez and Parish. Shields is the grant\u2019s principal investigator (PI); Gomez and Parish are co-principal investigators.<\/p>\n

The three-year grant is earmarked for the purchase of an additional high-performance computer cluster to join existing MERCURY resources hosted at Clemson University\u2019s Palmetto Cluster HPC Center<\/a>. The grant will enable 13 more undergraduate-focused research groups to benefit, growing the consortium to 47 computational scientists<\/a> at 41 institutions nationwide.<\/p>\n

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George C. Shields, Furman Department of Chemistry.<\/p><\/div>\n

The grant will also enable the scientists to encourage more students, especially women and students from traditionally underrepresented groups, to pursue studies in chemistry. \u201cOur students will have the best of both worlds,\u201d Shields said. \u201cStudents will benefit from inclusion in peer groups at the local level as well as at the consortium level,\u201d he added, noting the consortium has served more than 1,000 students in their research projects and spurred hundreds of students to engage in graduate work in chemistry or related fields.<\/p>\n

With processing muscle measured in petaflops (each PFlop equal to one thousand trillion operations per second), the CPUs added to the MERCURY computing environment will enable the PIs and their students to spend less time waiting for number crunching and more time formulating new questions.<\/p>\n

Broader impacts of the grant include:<\/p>\n