REU Site: The Summer Systematics Institute: training the next generation of scientists for the field, the lab, and sharing their science with the world

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This REU Site award to the California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco, CA, will support the training of 10 students for 9 weeks during the summers of 2019? 2021. Research will primarily be conducted at the Academy and at local field sites in Sonoma County, CA. The Academy's Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability is a research hub focused on understanding the natural world and finding solutions to sustaining it. The institution houses world-class natural history research collections, along with modern day technology and genomics tools needed to study these specimens. Participants of the Summer Systematics Institute will begin the summer with fieldwork and immersive workshops, before returning to the Academy to be paired with mentors, who are curators in the Institute, to work on original research projects and attend seminars which provide tools in the field of systematics and phylogenetics. The summer culminates with writing a scientific abstract and a popular science article, and giving an oral presentation to the community in in end-of-program symposium. Students apply through an online application system and will be recruited from universities and community colleges across the country. Applicants identify potential mentors during the application process, and applications are competitively reviewed by advisors who make the final selection of participants. It is anticipated that a total of 30 students, primarily from schools with limited research opportunities, will be trained in the program. Students will learn how biodiversity-focused research is conducted, and many will present the results of their work at local symposia and scientific conferences. A common web-based assessment tool used by all REU Site programs funded by the Division of Biological Infrastructure will be used to determine the effectiveness of the training program. Students will be tracked after the program in order to determine their career paths. Students will be asked to respond to an automatic email sent via the NSF reporting system. More information about the program is available by visiting https://www.calacademy.org/summer-systematics-institute, or by contacting the PI (Dr. Lauren Esposito at lesposito@calacademy.org) or the co-PI (Dr. Rebecca Johnson at rjohnson@calacademy.org).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.