Research Training Group in Optical Biomolecular Devices

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The program of training envisioned by the ASU group involves a comprehensive set of activities including formal coursework, laboratory introductions, a seminar series with strongly participatory elements, and an evaluation structure for monitoring the progress of each individual student at regular intervals. Overall this portion of the team's presentation was a strength of the program. It is clear that the group took the training function seriously and spent considerably energy developing a highly ambitious program of training with many innovative features. Obviously they have collectively evaluated those factors in the training of advanced students in interdisciplinary areas which are likely to be most valuable and have attempted to include those in the proposed program.. Comments below on the individual elements of the training program are meant to help the team fine-tune the approach, rather than to detract from the overall enthusiasm with which this portion of the presentation was received. The program of formal coureswork, consisting of a laboratory and lecture course along with a seminar series with serious participation by the students is very ambitious and highly original. The lecture course seeks to provide an overview to all of the students entering the program in a given year of the broad issues in biophotonic devices from a top-down reverse engineering perspective. The strength of this course is that it has the potential to provide a very broad perspective to students at an early stage in their graduate careers, before they have had time to develop disciplinary prejudices, which limit vision in more traditionally trained students. The danger, and one which is explicitly recognized by the team, is that any particular topic will be very deep for most of the class and relatively shallow for a small segment. The inclusion of a section on intellectual property issues from a legal perspective introduces an element of "real world" consideratio ns which is responsive to currently popular concerns about the relevance of traditional academic training. The laboratory course, designed to expose students to a broad survey of issues important to biophotonic device manipulation, is very challenging, perhaps too much so for a group of students with the diverse backgrounds expected of students entering the program. If carefully designed this highly ambitious experiment in graduate laboratory work could be a cornerstone of a new way of thinking about interdisciplinary training, which could be extended to other universities and other programs. However, it is clear that there are practical issues, e.g., length of time of produce workable mutants, familiarity with simple chemical synthetic manipulations, etc., which need to be more carefully thought out. In both of these formal course experiences it is important that the ASU administration has agreed to add the proposed activities to the portfolio of courses currently offered so that the assignment to either of these courses does not come as an overload, which would detract from the overall effectiveness of the faculty member involved. The seminar program aims to place students in real contact with a variety of external experts and should prove to be a valuable addition to the formal training program. Students, under direction of the course director, are to carefully read and discuss the work of a selected set of speakers prior to their talks and should be well-poised to benefit from the on-campus presence of the speaker. In addition the multidisciplinary project meetings should be extremely positive experiences for the students in the program. These meetings which will have the character of an extended group meeting promise to allow students from diverse backgrounds to delve into details of a research problem on a common footing but from their own different perspectives. In short they are, just the kind of experience many of them are likely to have as parts of research teams in the industrial environment upon graduation. Recruitment/Woodbury This is an ambitious program that will need a very high quality of students that have a broad background and much curiosity, ambition, and drive. Recruitment into the program will occur at two levels. In one, students will be attracted to come to A.S.U. because they want to come into this program. However, students will also be recruited out of the current pool of general applicants to science and engineering. The goal is to attract 6 students per year from 5 departments (3 in arts and sciences and 2 in the school of engineering). There is no provision for students to transfer into the program after their first year in graduate school. Standard recruitment strategies are largely in place. There are good, innovative programs for attracting minority students. The current enrollment has a high proportion of students that are eligible for support by N.S.F. There is good faculty commitment to recruiting visits. The college makes an investment in bringing students in to visit the college. They have mechanisms to contact applicant that they hope to attract by email during the time the students are making their decision. Current students talk of being attracted to the university by coming on visits and meeting interested faculty. This program, by the excitement of the intellectual offerings it provides should prove help them ensure that the best students accept offers at A.S.U. The difficulty is to find entry level students that are interested in this particular program. The average A.S.U. graduate student might not be interested in this ambitious program. However, the faculty quality is more than sufficient and there is a number of students in the existing program who would meet the ambitious needs of the program. They will need to get a few of the most ambitious students from each of the 5 departments to join the program. One challenge may be to make sure that the allocation of training positions is spread out equitably among the departments. Thus, recruitment will require students to be directed to this unusual and exciting program. Recruitment of students of students may be best achieved by word of mouth within the scientific community. The visiting scientist component of the grant can also serve as a recruitment mechanism, since when colleagues return to their home institutions they will send their best students. However, in order to maintain the right students it will be important to maintain program's focus so that this remains a high visibility offering at A.S.U.