REU Site: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Tropical Biology at the La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica

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This REU Site award to the Organization for Tropical Studies, located in Durham, NC, will support the training of 10 students for nine weeks during the summers of 2015-2017. This program exposes students to the wide array of research taking place at the La Selva Research Station in a lowland wet tropical forest of Costa Rica. As part of the program, students will work under the mentorship of active researchers on projects related to tropical ecology and evolutionary biology. Research areas include forest regeneration, faunal declines, land use changes, and biological corridors. In addition, students participate in a series of workshops on ethics, science communication, statistics in R, and tropical biology. The core objective of the program is for students to conduct independent research under the guidance of a research mentor. Students design their own research project from beginning to end and develop, conduct, and present their findings at the end of the summer. It is anticipated that a total of 30 students, from groups underrepresented in the sciences and non-RI research institutions will be trained in this program. Students design their own research projects from beginning to end and develop, conduct, and present their findings at the end of the summer. A second objective of the program is for the students to publish their research results and present their findings at national and international meetings. Program assessments are documented by pre- and post-program surveys and a program-wide evaluation. In addition, a common web-based assessment tool used by all REU programs funded by the Division of Biological Infrastructure (Directorate for Biological Sciences) will be used to determine the effectiveness of the training program. Students will be tracked after the program and must respond to an automatic email sent via the NSF reporting system. More information is available by visiting the OTS website at www.tropicalstudies.org or by contacting the PI (Dr. Elizabeth C. Losos at elosos@duke.edu).