RCN-UBE Incubator: Building an interdisciplinary regional network to expose under-represented students to biological research in its community context

Research has shown that under-served students typically have few opportunities to engage in high-impact research activities and that first-generation college students want their learning to be connected to their home communities. When educators attempt to improve upon undergraduate research opportunities they frequently focus on placing only select students in one-on-one faculty mentored research and fail to link the research to the students’ daily lives.

All students should have an opportunity to participate in research in ways that make explicit connections between the content, process, and application of research, or they risk not being able to see the relevance of biological science to their own lives. This RNC-UBE incubator network will remove these barriers by developing course-based opportunities for students to engage with real-life data sets provided by regional organizations whose work is informed by biological research.

Therefore, all students taking introductory biology courses will build research skills within a socially meaningful and applied community context. Furthermore, by participating in the course-based research modules developed by this regional network, students will gain a greater understanding of job market diversity as it pertains to skills gained during biological research.

This network brings together educators from different universities, community colleges, as well as research scientists from an urban health department, a nationally recognized primate research center, and a major regional river authority tasked with ecological stewardship. The network members will participate in workshops designed to develop course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) which will be implemented as pilot modules in introductory biology courses.

Workshops will also identify alignment of modules with core curriculum learning objectives, community partner needs, and potential barriers to implementation. During the pilot CURE modules students will collect and analyze data sets on the prevalence and disparities of heritable genetic disorders, diabetes, cancer or environmental threats to the community, many of which disproportionately burden the network’s predominately Hispanic population.

This RCN-UBE Incubator will increase collaborative research among students, academia, industry, and community civic services and thus enhance the diversity of the future STEM workforce. Students participating in the modules will develop skills in science communication by sharing their results with public groups, family members and network representatives.

The impact of the network will extend beyond students and faculty to include members of the community who might otherwise have limited exposure to scientific research, thereby nurturing positive attitudes towards biological research and increased engagement and support of family members with their children’s STEM education.

This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/). This project is also supported by the NSF HSI and IUSE:EHR programs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.