EAGER: Building a Starting Core for No-Boundary Education and Research Network

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The team proposes a new concept of "No-Boundary Thinking (NBT)", which emerged from an NSF EPSCoR-supported Workshop in Bioinformatics at Little Rock, Arkansas in 2013, as well as follow-on meetings and discussions. The aim is to build a starting core to further explore no-boundary thinking in education and research through an innovative network of universities and projects. No-boundary thinking will be the key connection among a distributed set of researchers, students and science challenges. This project is a joint effort of 24 faculty members from 19 institutions from 13 states, with the represented research areas including fundamental life sciences, biology, agriculture, biophysics, biochemistry, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and statistics.The focus of NBT is no-boundary problem defining. The goal is to educate and train students with NBT through development of a "No-Boundary Education and Research Network". The team will Identify 3-4 no-boundary research problems for which current interdisciplinary research or bigdata approaches do not work well and apply no-boundary thinking in problem defining. The focus is problem defining, not just problem solving. Then, students will learn with a no-boundary thinking approach through research projects and problems, which should lead to an understanding of the roles of data, approaches, and infrastructure/High Performance Computing in problem defining and solving, and provide them with opportunities to learn to integrate data collection, approach design, and infrastructure to address scientific research challenges. Outreach will include a national meeting to discuss the impacts of current interdisciplinary research and big-data to science and education, and how to further promote NBT nationally.