The NDSU Development Foundation has awarded four grants totaling $136,000 through the NDSU Impact Fund. The fund, which offers major grants of $20,000 to $75,000, provides grants for programs that have a direct and positive impact on the lives and educational experiences of students.
Available to faculty, staff and recognized student groups, the program is funded by unrestricted contributions received from alumni, parents and friends, as well as proceeds from the annual Bison Bidders Bowl. The Grants and Awards Committee of the Development Foundation’s board of trustees meets each year during Homecoming week to choose grant recipients from applications and presentations. This year, the committee presented awards for four exciting and innovative projects.
A grant of $19,000 will fund the Department of Communication and Bison Information Network (BIN) to purchase remote broadcasting equipment to air a variety of NDSU-related events. The equipment will allow the remote broadcast of student government-sponsored events, academic lectures and events, fine arts and alumni events, and admission activities on “SUTV news,” shown on Cable One Channel 14. The equipment is expected to help BIN further establish itself as a regional and national leader in civic journalism and remote broadcasting.
Two symposia presented and hosted by the NDSU School of Music will receive $30,000. The first is the Choral Music of the Americas, scheduled for May 1-5, 2013. It will feature guest choral experts from North and South America, plus performance opportunities for students from NDSU and surrounding high schools. The second symposium is the Wind Symphonies of the Americas, set for fall semester 2013. The symposia are intended to elevate the NDSU School of Music to a position of national leadership and prominence.
A grant of $41,000 will enable NDSU to establish a Center for Cloud Computing, which is anticipated to have a profound impact on NDSU students, staff and faculty. The center will provide the necessary computing facilities for course demonstrations and laboratory exercises pertaining to cloud computing. The center also will administer a Certificate in Cloud Computing for returning and current students to be educated for the $1 trillion per year industry.
The NDSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will receive $46,000 to purchase up to seven high-performance computers with a graphic processing unit that will be available for students at all times in the department’s computer cluster. The computers will be used in regular lab sections that will include educational activities aimed at educating students how they can develop code to efficiently explore the intensive parallel processing in the thread processors of the computers.
John Wold, chair of the foundation’s Grants and Awards Committee said, “ We are very excited about these awards, they will make a significant impact on students at NDSU. You will see the NDSU Impact Fund logo start to appear more and more on the campus as this funding resource continues to grow. We look forward to next year and what great things we will again be able to fund.”
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.