Broadening Participation in Interdisciplinary Science: The REU Component of LA-STEM

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award to co-investigators Connie Stelly, Lisa Batiste-Evans, Saundra McGuire, Su-Seng Pang, and Isiah Warner will support twenty undergraduate research students each year for a period of three years. The research context in which these students will be working is broadly multidisciplinary and provides opportunities for first and second year undergraduates to pursue research projects under the tutelage of their choice of 24 faculty members with active research programs in departments ranging from biology to chemistry to chemical engineering to mechanical engineering to computational science to physics to astronomy and beyond. The students will be drawn from two diverse pools: The NSF/LA-STEM Research Scholars and the HHMI Professors Program Scholars. The NSF/LA-STEM program is a joint NSF - Research Corporation - State of Louisiana collaboration that has an overall mission of increasing the number of underrepresented students receiving terminal degrees in the STEM disciplines. It is modeled after the widely recognized Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UMBC and has, to date, produced outstanding results as measured by the scholastic achievement of a very diverse cadre of undergraduates. Co-mingling these students with those supported as HHMI Professors Program Scholars brings into the mix a group of quite good peer mentors, and aspect of undergraduate training emphasized in the HHMI program.This award provides a unique opportunity for undergraduates to enjoy research experiences as integral parts of their undergraduate training. The faculty with whom the students will work is an impressive lot and equally impressive is the list of PIs and Co-PIs, which includes two Presidential Awardees for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (Warner and Sang).