University Awards SEC-Supported Faculty Travel Grants

The University of Arkansas has awarded four $2,500 travel grants to faculty who plan to conduct research at other institutions in the Southeastern Conference.

The SEC Visiting Faculty Travel Grant Program is intended to enhance faculty collaboration that stimulates scholarly initiatives among the conference’s 14 member universities. It gives faculty from one SEC university the opportunity to travel to another SEC campus to exchange ideas, develop grant proposals, and conduct research.

A maximum of four travel grants — funded by the SECU academic initiative — are available to each university for visiting faculty to use during an appropriate period, such as a sabbatical leave, the summer or a designated university break. The visiting faculty member may consult with faculty and/or students, offer lectures or symposia, or engage in whatever activities are productive for the visitor and host campus.

All areas of research and scholarly activity were eligible for support. The U of A faculty selected for travel grants are: Dennis Beck, curriculum and instruction; Andrew Braham, civil engineering; Nathan Parks, psychology; and the team of Patricia Amason and Lynne Webb, communications.

Beck, an assistant professor of educational technology, has researched and written about K-12 virtual schooling for special education students and virtual school leaders. He aims to develop a collaborative research partnership between the U of A’s educational technology program and the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education at the University of Kentucky.

Braham, an assistant professor, studies transportation materials and a major component of his laboratory deals with pavement maintenance and rehabilitation products. He plans to travel to the University of Florida to discuss research collaboration with Reynaldo Roque, professor of civil engineering and one of the premier pavement researchers in the United States.  

Parks, an assistant professor of psychological science, is interested in the balance between the speed and accuracy of dexterous behavior, such as reaching, grasping and eye fixations. This phenomenon is known as the speed-accuracy-trade-off. He will use his grant to learn how to collect and process brain recordings from monkeys at the primate neurophysiology laboratory at the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Amason, an associate professor, and Webb, a professor, both teach and write about family communication. They will travel to the University of Missouri in Columbia to meet with two professors there to develop a joint line of research examining online communication surrounding child adoption.

Each of these projects has the potential to become a fully supported research collaboration.

The SEC Visiting Faculty Travel Grant is one of several programs of the SECU academic initiative. SECU, headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., sponsors, supports and promotes collaborative higher education programs and activities involving administrators, faculty and students at its member universities.