Dave Toth, assistant professor of computer science, and his collaborator, Dr. Jimmy Franco, an assistant professor of chemistry at Merrimack College, were one of two winners of the 2012 Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Sciences (UCES) Award. The winners were selected from a set of finalists for the award who were invited to present their work in Boston on February 27th at the 2013 SIAM Conference on Computational Science & Engineering.
The web site of the Krell Institute, which administers the award, states that “the UCES Award program was created to promote and enhance undergraduate education in computational engineering and science (CES). The program encourages development of innovative educational resources and programs, recognizes the achievements of CES undergraduate educators, and serves to disseminate educational material and ideas to the broad scientific and engineering undergraduate community. Awarded annually, UCES is funded by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program administered by the Krell Institute.
The purpose of the UCES Award program is to recognize undergraduate faculty who have recently developed courses, programs, and/or curricular material. Such contributions need not be broad in scope, but should be innovative and transferable to other institutions or programs.”
Toth & Franco created a week-long lab activity that teaches students how to perform virtual screening with a supercomputer to identify potential drugs. They published their work in the Journal of Computational Science Education. The materials for the activity, including a 27 page full-color lab manual and other materials people would need to use the lab in their own courses are available online.
