The following are representative faculty members at George Mason University who are successfully combining research, teaching, and technology. They are just a few of the institution's 800 full-time scholars who are making significant contributions in areas as diverse as computational statistics, public policy, medicine, visual information technology, and physics. All owe their success in great part to partnerships between colleagues, student and teacher, education and business, and the public and private sectors. Many of these collaborations are forged by Mason faculty members themselves, fueled both by their own entrepreneurial spirit and by the contributions of the university's many supporters.

• The safety of the National Airspace is almost completely dependent upon technology and George Mason’s Air Transportation Lab, headed by George Donohue, Senior Research Professor within the School of Public Policy, is a major player when it comes to research in that arena. Through the lab’s membership in the Federal Aviation Administration’s national Center of Excellence program, graduate students have cutting-edge air transportation research opportunities, such as modeling the safety of high capacity airports with special attention to aircraft collisions and wake vortex interactions, or working on a new generation of computer simulation methods for capturing the dynamic behavior of large and complex networks. Students also attend meetings and conferences where breakthrough research is presented, side-by-side with distinguished researchers from other institutions as well as aviation industry and government representatives.
  
  
• Data captured from satellites hundreds of miles overhead are being used by students in Earth Systems Science and remote sensing to analyze environmental issues as part of the Center for Earth Observing and Space Research’s participation in the Virginia Access-Middle Atlantic Geospatial Information Consortium. Menas Kafatos, dean of the School of Computational Sciences and Informatics and director of the center, is the principal investigator for the multimillion-dollar consortium. Various imaging technologies, including hyperspectral sensing, which can detect the kind of material being observed remotely based on electromagnetic spectral frequencies, are being applied to hand use and land change management, forestry management, Chesapeake Bay pollution control, wetlands inventories, mosquito control, and fire, storm, and oil spill hazard mitigation
  
  
• Taking what Cindy Lont, professor of communication, calls a “partial-distance” course in COMM 655, students work together in teams throughout the semester on a project, but can “attend” lectures in their very own living room. The course is based around Video Modules, which are complete programs that air over GMU-TV, are for sale in the Student Technology Assistance and Resource Center, or can be viewed in the library. After watching the modules for content, students are then required to have educational discussions via WEB-CT, a class discussion group. Students work in small groups to complete a final visual project for the class using the theories presented. This course has won two Communicator Awards, the Best Take Award from the International Television Association in Washington, D.C., two Telly Awards, and a Video Excellence Award.
  
  
• Visit a movie theatre at the turn of the century. Browse through the oddities of P.T. Barnum’s museum. Create a simulated utopian world. These are some of the assignments that Michael O’Malley, associate professor and creative director of the Center for History and New Media, has students complete. Using web-based historical simulation games, archives from the Library of Congress, and digitized primary documents, students interpret and explore the past by using technology of the future. In O’Malley’s “Magic Detection, and Illusion in the Turn of the Century America” course, students are taken through a web-based game in which they meet cloaked figures on the street, talk with knowledgeable bartenders, sneak peeks into a turn-of-the-century police station, and read dime novels. In addition, his students are required to create their own webpage and online journal. This course is designed to give students an extensive tutorial on how to read and analyze historical documents, and to look at the ways in which popular culture, music, politics, and law influenced each other.
  
  
• Learning through hands-on experience with sophisticated hardware and software tools is a critical component of education today. Art and Visual Technology students and alumni provide low-cost training, design, and development of innovative animation, multimedia and Internet-based products, applications, and services.
  
  
• "Who Built America" is a scholarly but lively history of the United States from 1876 to 1914, when forces like immigration and industrialization combined to transform the nation. Based on a book by the same title, the CD-ROM version is a "social history" that proceeds from the point of view of average Americans, rather than the traditional recounting of political or diplomatic milestones. This electronic history "book" was developed by associate professor Roy Rosenzweig and two colleagues in New York and California. Users can take notes in the margins of pages or in a pop-up notepad, create lists of documents and film clips to which they can refer, and jump instantly between distant sections of the material that refer to the same or related topics. They can also view period entertainment and documentary films, listen to oral histories on subjects as diverse as lynching and abortion, and hear popular songs and vaudeville sketches.
  
  
• Watching the earth's transmutations is an exciting and perplexing challenge to scientist and layman alike, particularly recently, as we have witnessed the sometimes devastating environmental impacts of El Niño and other climatalogical phenomena. Professor Menas Kafatos, working at the Center for Earth Observing and Space Research in the Institute for Computational Sciences and Informatics, is among those committed to tracking and predicting such occurrences and making valuable data available globally over the Internet. In cooperation with the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies in Maryland, the University of Delaware, George Washington University, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, George Mason University is participating in one phase of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program. The program combines experts in the areas of science, information technology, and data management.
  
  
• Walking inside a brain is just one of the ways Professor Edward Wegman and his staff of graduate researchers at the Center for Computational Statistics are using virtual reality to make different types of data more meaningful and useful. The center conducts pioneering research in high-end visualization methods for statistical application, replacing the bar graphs and pie charts of the past. In the lab, photo-quality images of statistical applications for human genome research, environmental remediation, chemical agent detection, and weather and climate data come to life as 3D models that can be viewed from every possible angle. Data may come in various forms, such as numerical data and images. The center also has developed ExploreN, a research tool used for visualizing multidimensional data. More information can be found at the George Mason University Statistics web page.
  
  
• Flexible training options are becoming an increasingly important component of higher education today, particularly in technology-related fields in regions such as the nation's capital, where a high-technology worker shortage is straining businesses. One answer to the problem is to provide distance learning opportunities, which allow students to participate in real-time courses remotely via the Internet or, in other cases, to download class materials from their own computer at a time convenient for them. Professor Mark Pullen of the Computer Science Department is involved in several distance learning projects, including a year-long graduate-level Network Science Certificate program. Designed for those working in the technology field, the program is taught over the Internet to students in remote locations using materials already prepared on a website.