UMEB: Diversity & Excellence in Environmental Biology

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NSF funding will establish an Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) program in the Department of Biology at the University of Vermont. The Biology Department has developed a program integrating spatial statistics and environmental biology that enhances minority opportunities in environmental biology. The program is based on the principle that all members of a community benefit from diversity, targeting the department as the center of implementation.Individual summer field research projects, spanning diverse topics including plant-animal interactions, environmental physiology, host-parasite interactions, molecular ecology, phylogenetics and community structure, will have spatial variation as a common theme. The program reaches early in the pipeline, recruiting eight high school seniors and pairing them with a faculty mentor for their undergraduate education. For four years, students will be involved with research going on in their faculty mentor's lab. The program includes training in problem oriented computer modeling, introductory statistics, population genetics and a capstone spatial statistics course. Students will have a semester colloquium devoted to developing peer reviewed research proposals, followed by a summer field research project. The capstone course is devoted to statistical analysis of their own dataset. The training initiative adopts the Minority Opportunities through School Transformation (MOST) program. MOST was developed to transform sociology curricula with the aim of creating a general model of change that would work in a variety of institutional settings and could transfer to other disciplines. Program evaluation is designed to facilitate comparison with sociology MOST programs, as well as examine the efficacy of the program in other disciplines. Dissemination of program efforts and evaluation will be done through the internet (http://www.uvm.edu/~biology/?Page=Otherlinks/umeb.html), presentations at meetings and publication. For more information, contact Dr. Lori Stevens at lori.stevens@uvm.edu