RaMP: Making meaningful connections: Fostering the Integration of Biodiversity Patterns with Genetic Evolutionary Mechanisms (BioGEM)

Given the severity and complexity that a rapidly changing climate imposes on all life on Earth, a multi-faceted approach to addressing the biodiversity crisis is needed. This project brings together a group of mentors with diverse expertise, ranging from genomics to paleontology, in order to train postbaccalaureate scholars in integrative and interdisciplinary organismal biology research.

Scholars and their mentors will engage in research that spans time scales, biological hierarchies, and organisms across the tree of life, to address specific questions regarding past, present, and future organismal responses to a changing environment. Three cohorts of ten postbaccalaureate scholars each will be recruited to broaden participation in the sciences.

Network partners include a local tribal college, regional primarily undergraduate institutions, a biomedical research institute, and a non-profit organization that interfaces with industry. In bringing together a diverse group of mentors, network partners, and postbaccalaureate scholars to engage in interdisciplinary research, this project will provide extensive training that diversifies the workforce in integrative organismal biology, while leading to important discoveries that help better understand and predict biological responses to a changing climate.

This program centers on integrating Biodiversity science and Genetic Evolutionary Mechanisms (BioGEM) to investigate biological responses to climate change. BioGEM postbaccalaureate scholars will be primarily based at the University of Kansas (KU) and utilize KU’s world-class facilities and museum collections to conduct research that incorporates the network’s expertise in biodiversity science (phylogenetics, paleontology, morphometrics, biogeography, and community ecology) and genetic evolutionary mechanisms (comparative and functional genomics, developmental biology, and quantitative genetics).

Specifically, studying speciation/extinction/persistence, paleobiogeography, and morphological disparity and innovation will allow us to address how organisms, species, and clades were shaped by their past environment; studying population dynamics, ecological interactions, and biogeographic patterns will allow us to address how organisms, populations, and species respond to their present biotic and abiotic environment; and studying plasticity, genomic responses to adaptation, and mechanisms of genetic diversity will allow us to address how genetic mechanisms equip organisms to respond to future environmental change. A key component of the BioGEM program experience is a weekly Professional & Scholarly Advancement series, involving the mentors and network partners, that will include both professional development workshops and hands-on mentor-led training modules covering a wide range of research methods.

The BioGEM program is geared towards recent graduates that have had limited or no prior research experience.

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.