RCN-UBE: Advancing Integration of Museums into Undergraduate Programs (AIM-UP!)

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AIM-UP! (Advancing the Integration of Museums into Undergraduate Programs) is aresearch coordination network that produces new ways of incorporating the extensive archives and cyberinfrastructure of natural history museums into undergraduate education under five primary themes. These themes explore complex biotic associations across space and time, geographic variation, evolutionary dynamics of genomes, biotic response to climate change, and coevolving communities of pathogens and hosts as related to emerging diseases. AIM-UP! is refining existing efforts and developing new integrated approaches to collections-based training in large-scale questions using the combined and broadly-based expertise of educators, curators, collection managers, database managers, and scientists whose teaching and investigations span across various disciplines and relate to topics covering a wide spectrum of time and space. The network is 1) developing teaching and analytic tools in training students in the emerging fields of climate change, evolutionary genomics and molecular ecology; 2) developing of instructional tools for museum databases, such as ARCTOS, that are freely available to the public, teachers, and scientists via the AIM-UP! website; 3) developing an integrated network of educators working on specimen-based questions; 4) including diverse collaborators, including minority and female scientists, federal agency biologists, academics, international participants, and museums with large public audiences; 5) training undergraduate students in museum-based field and laboratory research; and 6) conducting outreach efforts targeted especially to underrepresented students with an emphasis on issues relevant to their communities. Network participants communicate through 1) an annual three-day all-hands working meeting at field stations and participating institutions; 2) workshops at scientific meetings; 3) frequent interaction via interactive internet services (e.g., video conferencing, Wiggio, AIM-UP! blog, ARCTOS blog); 4) short-term exchanges of museum educators for intensive content development; 5) a short course (two weeks) for undergraduate students at 1 host institution to beta-test new approaches, and 6) a fall semester seminar course at the University of New Mexico (available via webcasting to all network participants). While AIM-UP! began as a collaboration between the University of Alaska, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico as a way to integrate expertise and experiences across these institutions, it is currently being expanded to other educational institutions, federal agencies, and a large museum-based genetic consortium in Canada.This project is supported jointly by the Biological Sciences Directorate and the Division of Undergraduate Education.