OREM -- A stone's throw from the roaring din on I-15, students at Utah Valley State College study a rebirth of wetlands at the edge of the sprawling campus.
"What a wonderful place to have a lab," said Renee VanBuren, a professor who recently oversaw the removal of prickly Russian olive bushes from the grassy campus outskirts to stimulate growth of native vegetation.VanBuren, who studies the wetlands with her students, is part of a movement at UVSC -- one that takes students out of the classrooms and into research fields.
Three years ago, UVSC professors were working on just a handful of studies. Now, faculty and students are involved in about 15 research projects -- all funded by private sources.
Utah Valley professors also have been invited to discuss their findings at forums at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
"This is something we've talked about for several years," said President Kerry D. Romesburg. "As we've evolved into a four-year institution, we've pursued faculty who are interested in involving students in research."
Professors urging students to help compile research for publication in journals is nothing new to colleges and universities -- but UVSC is new to the world of research.
Under the educational model adopted by Utah's System of Higher Education, UVSC is defined as a teaching institution. That means professors are required to spend more time in front of a classroom than inside a laboratory.
But to gain tenure at most universities -- and prestige in the world of academia -- professors are under pressure to have research published in reputable journals.
Most of the research done by Utah professors is conducted at the University of Utah, Utah State University or Brigham Young University, which boast graduate programs and pursue multimillion-dollar grants to continue delving into the unknown.
A grant to the U. from the U.S. Department of Energy three years ago to study potential accidental fires and explosions in old nuclear weapons is alone nearly half the amount UVSC receives annually in state money to operate the school.
But many at UVSC believes undergraduate research projects are valuable teaching tools.
UVSC professor Paul Bybee is working in tandem with other Utah paleontologists and the Chicago Field Museum on a study of a skull of an allosaurus, which lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic era.
"We're putting out a lot of papers and getting a lot of people involved," Bybee said, adding that the study on the dinosaur is ground breaking in the paleontology field.
"We're not a research institution. We'll continue to be a teaching institution," Romesburg said. "That doesn't mean we can't pursue those types of research."