A Course-Based Undergraduate Conference Experience in Computational Biology

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Research experiences for undergraduates have been enormously successful in recruiting and engaging students within STEM disciplines. However, many institutions lack the resources to offer such experiences to a majority of their undergraduates. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) integrate research activities within the curriculum, engaging a larger subset of undergraduates and reporting similar learning outcomes. Conference attendance is a specific example of a research experience in which few undergraduates get to engage. A natural extension of a CURE is a course-based undergraduate conference experience. Reed College, a primarily undergraduate institution in Portland OR, will offer an interdisciplinary upper-level Computational Systems Biology course in the fall of 2016 (anticipated enrollment of twelve students). This award will allow the class to attend the ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB 2016) in Seattle, WA. ACM-BCB is an ideal venue for a conference experience due to the quality of presented work, relevance of the conference topics to the course, and geographic proximity to Reed. ACM-BCB will be integrated into the course syllabus: students will read and discuss papers, meet and interact with presenters, and extend ideas from the conference as part of a multi-week programming based final project. Students will submit their research work as posters to ACM-BCB and the associated workshops. The research concerns different ways to model signal transduction pathways using graphs and graph extensions. The broader impacts of this proposal are multi-faceted. First, it will promote interdisciplinary research by educating students about computer science applications within biology. Second, it will empower students with a unique opportunity that few undergraduates obtain, leading to an anticipated increased confidence in engaging in science and scientific research. Third, it will provide an opportunity for PIs from other institutions to interact with strong interdisciplinary undergraduates. Reed produces the third largest institutional-yield ratio of baccalaureates who obtain PhDs in the Math & Sciences, and ACM-BCB provides a powerful networking opportunity.The proposed travel is also a potential mechanism for recruiting underrepresented groups in STEM. The introductory computational biology courses in 2015-2016 included students from all years (freshmen through seniors) majoring in eight different areas (including four outside the Division of Math & Natural Sciences). Further, 60% of the students who completed the course were women, a group traditionally underrepresented in computer science. Thus, the pool of students eligible for the upper-level course (and the proposed conference travel) include a group that is diverse in terms of gender, class year, and declared major.