Principal Investigators

Mitchell Neilsen is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Kansas State University. He serves as the Program Director for the INSIGHT GK-12 STEM Fellowship Program. He manages the overall program, leads meetings of the principal investigators, and helps to coordinate the Summer Institute. He also works with CSE Director Spears to use ongoing evaluation data to improve the program, and to use INSIGHT to enhance ties between CSE and STEM departments at Kansas State University.

Dr. Gurdip Singh is a Professor of Computing and Information Sciences at KSU, and Director of the Center for Sensors and Sensor Systems. His research interests include real-time embedded systems, sensor networks, network protocols and distributed computing. His research has been funded by NSF, ARO, DARPA and Lockheed Martin. He has been involved in developing software tools to design large-scale, distributed safety critical systems which have been used for designing safety critical systems by several defense-related companies (Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, and Boeing). He is currently working on developing methodologies and tools for building integrated sensor systems in several application domains such as radiation surveillance and health monitoring. He is also working on analysis tools for automated optimization of distributed middleware.

Jacqueline Spears is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Director of the Center for Science Education at Kansas State University. She collaborates with STEM faculty to engage a more diverse population in STEM education. Current projects include a Noyce Scholarship program designed to increase the number of STEM graduates becoming licensed to teach in middle/high school, two G-K12 programs that support collaboration between STEM graduate students and public school teachers, and two projects focused on increasing public understanding of climate change. For INSIGHT, she assists with the summer institute, fellow-teacher partnerships, and evaluation.

Dr. Virgil Wallentine is Professor of Computing and Information Sciences at Kansas State University. His BS/MS/Phd degrees are all from Iowa State University. He five years of experience developing real-time operating systems and languages at the Atomic Energy Commission and then started teaching at the university level. This is his 40th year of teaching and conducting research at the university level. His areas of expertise are concurrent and distributed systems, impact of computing on society, and health information technology.

Dr. Naiqian Zhang is a Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Kansas State University. He mentors the GK-12 STEM fellows in research on applied sensor design for biological and agricultural systems. He is faculty adviser to the K-State's Robotics Team. He also is a member of Alpha Epsilon, the honor society of agricultural, food and biological engineering; Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society; Gamma Sigma Delta, agriculture honorary; and Sigma Xi, the scientific research society.