Integrated Web Services

Who's Working in Polymers? -- Dynamically Linking Faculty and Research Fields

Our clients wanted to make it easy for prospective graduate students is to find and learn about faculty working in their areas of interest. To that end, IWS built an interactive "research matrix" (image above) connecting the department faculty with the research fields that each is most active in. Users can highlight a field, and the faculty active in it, with a single mouse click. The research matrix itself is built dynamically, so that within broad limits, fields and faculty members can be added or deleted (using the site's form-driven management interface), and the matrix updates itself automatically.

One student wrote, "I was browsing through the internet at different graduate programs from many of the biggest schools and found it very difficult to figure out what professor was doing what or even what kind of research was going on. Just by curiosity I looked at the Cornell MSE site, and I wanted to say that it is AWESOME. That grid that lets you see by topic what each professor is doing is VERY effective. ...The design and organization is really great."

Visually Stunning

Materials Science is an extremely visual field, and Cornell's MS&E research has yielded many images that are both beautiful and illuminating. The MS&E faculty provided an excellent library of images for use inthe website, and it uses them in page mastheads and a gallery showcasing all of the major fields of research in the department.

Form-Driven Content Management

Like many IWS sites, this one for Materials Science uses a webform interface to allow the clients to manage changing data quickly and easily. For this site, data for News and Features, People, Research Fields, and Seminars are managed in this way.