Each year, Providence College students engage in original research and scholarship projects. Working side by side with faculty, students examine cutting-edge issues in fields ranging from political science to bioinformatics. The results are often published in academic journals or presented at national conferences.
This opportunity to work in professional collaboration with outstanding scholars provides students with a stimulating level of scholarship, research, and intellectual engagement that immeasurably enriches the undergraduate experience.
Examples of recent faculty-student collaboration:
Dr. J.T. Scanlan, associate professor of English, led a group of students from his Law and Literature class to the U.S. Supreme Court. The students met privately with Justice Stephen G. Breyer who discussed the cases they would hear and his book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution. The work of the Supreme Court epitomizes the skills Dr. Scanlon teaches his students--that of reading closely and actively and writing with precision and the aspiration to change the way others think.
Dr. Patrick J. Ewanchuk, assistant professor of biology, traveled to Belize with 14 students as part of their Tropical Biology course. The students spent time in the rainforest and on Belize's barrier reef-the second largest barrier reef in the world-as part of their individual research projects on tropical organisms and habitats. The students were guided through the rainforest on ethnobotany hikes and cave hikes as well as snorkeling in the mangroves on the barrier reef.
Dr. Mark S. Hyde, professor of political science, invited three students to participate in research on presidential elections and lobbyist regulations through independent study. As a result of their successful research projects, all three students were invited to present their jointly-authored research papers at the New England Political Science Association's annual meeting in 2007.
Rev. Jon Alexander, O.P. associate professor of history at Providence College, led fourteen students to publish the book, American POW Memoirs from the Revolutionary War through the Vietnam War ( Wipf and Stock Publishers), a collection of their papers. Fr. Alexander believes that this is the first time that a collection of papers written by students in a humanities undergraduate seminar have been published as a book.
PC faculty Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P.,Dr. Jay Pike, Dr. Charles Toth, and Dr. Yinsheng Wan use grant funding provided by the National Institutes of Health through PC's membership in Rhode Island's IdeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence to provide undergraduates with unique opportunies in biomedical research. Over the past four years, several dozen students have benefited from a close-knit mentorship relationship with faculty.