REU Site: Psychology Research Experience Program

该项目由SBE理事会的本科生研究经验（REU）站点计划资助。除了整合研究和教育之外，它还具有科学和社会效益。心理学和神经科学的博士学位被授予来自少数族裔（URM）群体的个人——种族和少数民族、低收入者和第一代大学生——其比例远远低于他们在总人口中的比例。威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校（UW）的心理学研究经验项目（PREP）试图通过采用REU机制的一个核心激励前提来解决这个问题，即研究经验是吸引学生并留住他们从事科学和工程的最有效途径之一，并为他们在这些领域的职业生涯做好准备。事实上，2011年至2020年，PREP的74名校友中，有三分之二的人目前正在从事博士后研究工作，他们正在攻读STEM学科的研究生课程，从事博士后研究活动，为申请研究生院做准备，或者完成STEM领域的本科学习。PREP每年夏季举办10周，在此期间，学生们将参与身临其境的指导研究，并在数据科学和专业发展方面进行动手课堂培训。每个预科学生都在心理学系的实验室或附属实验室进行研究项目。他们接受实验室首席研究员的指导，并接受实验室研究生或博士后的日常监督。每周的数据科学研讨会由UW的NSF研究培训（NRT）计划的教师和学员领导，该计划侧重于学习，理解，认知，智能和数据科学（LUCID）。每周的专业发展会议由心理学系的一组轮换教师领导。PREP的重点是将数据科学的原理和方法整合到心理学和神经科学的研究中。这是对西华大学教师进行的一项民意调查的结果：当你为自己的实验室招募研究生时，你寻求什么样的品质？每个接受调查的教员都有一个共同的回答，那就是之前有过技术技能方面的经验。具体要求因实验室而异，但编程能力，如MATLAB、python和/或R环境，是最常见的要求。更广泛地说，几乎所有心理学和神经科学领域的趋势都是越来越重视数据科学。在某些领域，它是数据挖掘和元分析。在某些情况下，它是大规模的数据收集，比如亚马逊的土耳其机器人（Mechanical Turk）基于互联网的研究。在神经科学领域，越来越多的人认识到，单个神经数据集本身可以构成一种“大数据”，机器学习和其他工程分支的方法正越来越多地应用于这种“大数据”。PREP的组织结构反映了PREP REU和LUCID NRT之间的密切联系。在行政方面，自2011年以来担任PREP的PI/主任Bradley Postle，由共同i Timothy Rogers加入，Timothy Rogers是Postle在心理学系的同事，也是LUCID的PI/主任。项目协调员协助主任在春季学期进行招生，管理后勤和学生生活，而参与者前往麦迪逊并居住在REU的居住部分，并跟踪项目校友。项目协调员还与Co-I密切合作，组织每周的数据科学研讨会。该计划的指导组织结构将每个PREP学生与三位导师配对：一位教师导师，他是心理学系或LUCID其他核心部门之一（计算机科学，电气与计算机工程，教育心理学）的终身/终身/终身教职或pi状态的教师；一名研究导师，为研究生或博士后，负责PREP学生的日常研究指导；该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并根据基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响评估标准进行了评估，认为值得支持。

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the SBE Directorate. It has both scientific and societal benefits in addition to integrating research and education. PhDs in psychology and neuroscience are awarded to individuals from underrepresented minority (URM) groups – racial and ethnic minorities, low-income, and first-generation college students – in proportions far lower than is their representation in the overall population. The Psychology Research Experience Program (PREP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) seeks to address this problem by adopting a core motivating premise of the REU mechanism, which is that Research experience is one of the most effective avenues for attracting students to and retaining them in science and engineering, and for preparing them for careers in these fields. Indeed, two-thirds of PREP’s 74 alumni from years 2011-2020, all from URM groups, are currently working as postdoctoral researchers, matriculating in a graduate program in a STEM discipline, engaged in postbac research activities in preparation for applying to graduate school, or finishing up their undergraduate studies in a STEM field of study. PREP is held for 10 weeks each the summer, during which students engage in immersive mentored research coupled with hands-on classroom training in data science, and professional development. Each PREP student carries out their research project in a laboratory in, or affiliated with, the Department of Psychology. They receive mentorship from the Principal Investigator of their lab, and day-to-day supervision from a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow in that lab. Weekly data science workshops are led by faculty and trainees of the UW’s NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program that focuses on learning, understanding, cognition, intelligence, and data-science (LUCID). Weekly professional development sessions are led by a rotating set of faculty from the Department of Psychology. PREP’s focus is on integrating principles and methods of data science into the study of psychology and neuroscience. This was developed as a result of polling faculty at the UW about What attributes do you seek when you are recruiting graduate students for your own lab? A response that was common across every faculty member polled was prior experience with technical skills. The specifics varied from lab to lab, but facility with programming, such as in MATLAB, python, and/or the R environment, was the most frequently listed desideratum. More broadly, a trend in almost all domains of psychology and neuroscience is an increased emphasis on data science. In some domains it’s data mining and meta analysis. In some, it’s large-scale data collection, such as internet-based studies with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In neuroscience, it’s the increasing appreciation that individual neural data sets can, in-and-of themselves, constitute a kind of “big data” to which methods from machine learning and other branches of engineering are increasingly being applied. PREP’s organizational structure reflects close ties between the PREP REU and the LUCID NRT. Administratively, the PI/Director of PREP, Bradley Postle, who has held this role since 2011, is joined by Co-I, Timothy Rogers, a colleague of Postle in the Dept. of Psychology who is also the PI/Director of LUCID. A Program Coordinator assists the Director with admissions during the Spring semester, management of logistics and student life while participants travel to and live in Madison for the residency portion of the REU, and tracking program alumni. The Program Coordinator also works closely with the Co-I to organize the weekly data science workshops. The program’s mentoring organizational structure pairs each PREP student with three mentors: a faculty mentor, who is a tenured/tenure-track/or PI-status faculty member at the Department of Psychology or at one of LUCID’s other core departments (Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Educational Psychology); a research mentor, who is the graduate student or postdoctoral fellow who is responsible for day-to-day research mentoring of the PREP student; and an alumni mentor, an alumna/us of PREP.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.