dcr&d summer work

It's been a busy summer so far. I've been working with a group of Undergraduate students as a part of our undergraduate research program. We created a DCR&D group to work on some group research projects in the DCRL. The students get paid by the University to work in the lab and the DCRL is able to test the possibilities of being an incubator for design research and the prototyping of research projects. Right now we are working on a Health Sciences collaborative project and building a clinical testing device. I can't post much about it as it's new research developed under a NSF funded grant, but we're hoping to be completed with phase III prototyping by the end of this week. We have many more projects that the team is working on and hopefully we will be able to show work from this in the future. I was fortunate to secure funding for a former graduate student as well as a current grad student to work as project managers on the work we are doing. The work has been great and it should benefit the DCRL's mission for the future. Unfortunately, I am not on contract this summer beyond my summer course, so my time involvement in this goes unpaid and unnoticed for the most part. I guess this is the nature of teaching in an art department where research is seen as typically making your own professional work for exhibitions. There is currently no precedent for this type of work in our department, so it's tough to sell to the powers that be and I'm not much of a squeaky wheel. It's no wonder we can't make anything great happen here at UWM when the work and research is not supported. Oh well... what can you do. I guess I'll keep applying for funding through grants, try to create new opportunities for collaboration on and off campus, build new facilities, create opportunities for our students to have access to technology and learning experiences that will benefit their future careers, and try not to get burned out. I need to find someone who would fund an endowed faculty position...