We change lives through science and math.
Our graduates change the world as educators, scientists, and leaders.
Our students will experience:
- opportunities to explore, create, and innovate,
- team-based problem solving in teaching and learning,
- interdisciplinary scientific research, and
- challenges to inspire individual achievement.
Progress in the natural sciences and mathematics is maximized through interdisciplinary collaborative teams built on separate and specific knowledge and approaches of their respective disciplines. Scientific endeavors increasingly depend on the integration of scientific theory, experimentation, and simulation. Solutions to the problems facing future generations involve ever larger and more complex databases capturing data of ever finer resolution. New scientific and mathematical methods often arise through an integration of qualitative and quantitative concepts to identify patterns and processes. As the world of science and technology changes, teaching, research, and learning methods adapt.
To meet the challenge of twenty-first-century science and math, students in the John J. and Char Kopchick College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics will learn the value of team settings in the laboratories, classrooms, clinics, and the field. Opportunities for exploration, creation and innovation are fostered by supporting faculty research clusters, multi-use instrumentation facilities, and common laboratory spaces where students and faculty work on joint projects and interact across disciplines. Classes incorporate project-based learning scenarios to cultivate informal learning and communication skills with peers and the campus community. Students integrate lessons learned in other classes into their work in natural sciences and mathematics. Our goal is that all of our majors and those students taking math and science courses as part of their major course of study will work and discover in a manner that is modeled by their mentors.
At IUP, students meet the world and the world comes to IUP, both physically and through technology. Our students interact with faculty and students in other parts of the US and around the world, allowing them to present their research findings at local, regional, and international venues. Challenges are met, and individual achievement is encouraged and celebrated. Our graduates become responsible life-long learners, applying lessons learned in the natural sciences and mathematics to their professional and personal lives, thus changing the world as educators, scientists, and leaders.