NSF Ideas Labs: Workforce Development Needs in Biology

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This project tests and facilitates a creative problem solving methodology that develops and engages multi-disciplinary research teams in order to produce radically innovative research agendas. This project establishes a natural experiment to examine a methodology that engages researchers in a novel collaborative process to develop potentially transformative ideas that will address the challenge of workforce development in any given STEM discipline, Biology in this case. Specifically, the project adapts a participatory action research (PAR) approach to facilitate the development of a problem solving environment and to study this real world problem solving situation in order to: (1) iteratively examine the complex social and intellectual processes involved in collaboration and in creative problem solving and (2) develop novel interdisciplinary research agendas in undergraduate STEM education that address workforce needs unique to Biology. Thus, the project's impact has potential for serving as a demonstration of the complex process of collaboration in multi-disciplinary research groups, as a test of social and individual process involved in collaboration and in creative problem solving, and as a means for documenting the development of radically innovative research agendas needed to develop the future workforce in Biology.