SpringfieldNewsSun.com

SPRINGFIELD — Wittenberg University has been given $338,400 for scholarship awards to science, technology and engineering majors, as well as others in mathematics, medicine and related education fields.

The scholarships, also known as STEM — named after science, technology, engineering athematics/medicine disciplines — will be awarded over the next five years.

Wittenberg is part of the Ohio Consortium for Bioinformatics, comprising 13 universities and partner institutions. The consortium will share $4.475 million awarded by the Ohio Innovation Partnership. The Consortium's goal is to make Ohio a leader in bioinformatics, the field of science that merges biology, computer science and information technology into a single discipline, university officials said.

The Ohio Innovation Partnership intends to attract and graduate around 345 STEM students from Ohio high schools over a five year period.

"What the grant means for Witt is we are going to have some very important support for students interested in biology with computation," said Eric Stahlberg, Wittenberg's director of computational science. "Wittenberg already has a very strong science and math program. This provides the opportunity to build on strengths Wittenberg already has."

The university became one of the first in the nation to offer a formal computation science program when it opened the Barbara Deer Kuss Science Center in 2003. Computational science can be applied to mathematics to model and solve problems in natural and social sciences, Stahlberg said.

Scholarship awards will begin this fall with freshman and sophomores offered first-stage scholarships. Juniors and seniors with a computational science minor will be eligible to apply for the a second-stage scholarship, Stahlberg said.