Research Training Group in Optical Biomolecular Devices

亚利桑那州立大学小组设想的培训计划包括一系列全面的活动，包括正式课程、实验室介绍、具有强烈参与性元素的系列研讨会，以及定期监测每个学生进步的评估结构。总的来说，团队的这一部分演示是该计划的一个优势。很明显，该团队非常重视培训功能，并花费大量精力制定了一个雄心勃勃的培训计划，其中包含许多创新功能。显然，他们已经集体评估了那些在跨学科领域培养高级学生的因素，这些因素可能是最有价值的，并试图将这些因素纳入拟议的计划中。下面对培训计划各个要素的评论是为了帮助团队调整方法，而不是为了降低这部分演示所带来的整体热情。正式的课程计划，包括实验室和讲座课程以及学生认真参与的系列研讨会，是非常雄心勃勃和高度原创的。讲座课程旨在从自上而下的逆向工程角度，为所有进入该课程的学生提供一个关于生物光子器件广泛问题的概述。这门课程的优势在于，它有可能为研究生生涯早期阶段的学生提供一个非常广阔的视角，在他们有时间形成学科偏见之前，这些偏见限制了传统教育学生的视野。这样做的危险，也是团队明确认识到的，就是任何特定的话题对大多数人来说都是非常深入的，而对一小部分人来说则相对肤浅。从法律角度列入关于知识产权问题的一节，引入了“现实世界”考虑的因素，这是对目前普遍关注的传统学术培训的相关性的回应。这门实验课程旨在让学生对生物光子器件操作的重要问题进行广泛的调查，这门课程非常具有挑战性，对于一群具有不同背景的学生来说，可能太困难了。如果在研究生实验室工作中精心设计这个雄心勃勃的实验，可能会成为跨学科培训新思路的基石，可以扩展到其他大学和其他项目。然而，很明显，存在一些实际问题，例如，生产可行突变体的时间长度，对简单化学合成操作的熟悉程度等，需要更仔细地考虑。在这两种正式的课程体验中，重要的是亚利桑那州立大学管理部门已经同意将拟议的活动添加到当前提供的课程组合中，以便这些课程的任务不会过载，这将降低相关教职员工的整体效率。研讨会计划旨在让学生与各种外部专家进行实际接触，并应被证明是正式培训计划的宝贵补充。在课程主任的指导下，学生在演讲前要仔细阅读和讨论选定的演讲者的作品，并做好准备，从演讲者的校园演讲中获益。此外，多学科项目会议对参与项目的学生来说应该是非常积极的经历。这些会议将具有扩展小组会议的特点，承诺让来自不同背景的学生在共同的基础上从他们自己不同的角度深入研究研究问题的细节。简而言之，正是他们中的许多人在毕业后作为工业环境中研究团队的一部分可能拥有的那种经历。招聘/伍德伯里这是一个雄心勃勃的项目，需要非常高质量的学生，他们有广泛的背景、好奇心、雄心和动力。该计划的招聘将分为两个层次。首先，学生们会被吸引到亚利桑那州立大学来，因为他们想参加这个项目。然而，学生也将从目前的普通申请者中招收科学和工程专业的学生。目标是每年从5个系吸引6名学生（文理系3名，工学院2名）。没有规定学生在研究生院一年后转入该计划。标准的招聘策略基本到位。有一些好的、创新的项目可以吸引少数族裔学生。目前的入学人数中，有很高比例的学生有资格获得国家科学基金会的支持。学院在吸引学生参观学院方面做了投资。他们有联系的机制，他们希望通过电子邮件吸引申请人在学生做决定的时候。现在的学生说，他们被这所大学吸引是因为来参观和会见感兴趣的教师。这个项目，通过它提供的令人兴奋的智力课程，应该证明有助于他们确保最优秀的学生接受亚利桑那州立大学的录取。困难的是找到对这个特定项目感兴趣的入门级学生。普通的亚利桑那州立大学研究生可能对这个雄心勃勃的项目不感兴趣。然而，教师的素质是绰绰有余的，有一些学生在现有的计划谁将满足该计划的雄心勃勃的需求。他们需要从5个院系中挑选一些最有抱负的学生加入这个项目。一个挑战可能是确保培训职位在各部门之间公平分配。因此，招聘将要求学生被引导到这个不同寻常的和令人兴奋的项目。招收学生或学生的最好办法可能是在科学界口口相传。该基金的访问科学家部分也可以作为一种招聘机制，因为当同事们回到他们的祖国机构时，他们会把最好的学生送到那里。然而，为了留住合适的学生，保持项目的重点是很重要的，这样它就能在亚利桑那州立大学保持高知名度

The program of training envisioned by the ASU group involves a comprehensive set of activities including formal coursework, laboratory introductions, a seminar series with strongly participatory elements, and an evaluation structure for monitoring the progress of each individual student at regular intervals. Overall this portion of the team's presentation was a strength of the program. It is clear that the group took the training function seriously and spent considerably energy developing a highly ambitious program of training with many innovative features. Obviously they have collectively evaluated those factors in the training of advanced students in interdisciplinary areas which are likely to be most valuable and have attempted to include those in the proposed program.. Comments below on the individual elements of the training program are meant to help the team fine-tune the approach, rather than to detract from the overall enthusiasm with which this portion of the presentation was received. The program of formal coureswork, consisting of a laboratory and lecture course along with a seminar series with serious participation by the students is very ambitious and highly original. The lecture course seeks to provide an overview to all of the students entering the program in a given year of the broad issues in biophotonic devices from a top-down reverse engineering perspective. The strength of this course is that it has the potential to provide a very broad perspective to students at an early stage in their graduate careers, before they have had time to develop disciplinary prejudices, which limit vision in more traditionally trained students. The danger, and one which is explicitly recognized by the team, is that any particular topic will be very deep for most of the class and relatively shallow for a small segment. The inclusion of a section on intellectual property issues from a legal perspective introduces an element of "real world" consideratio ns which is responsive to currently popular concerns about the relevance of traditional academic training. The laboratory course, designed to expose students to a broad survey of issues important to biophotonic device manipulation, is very challenging, perhaps too much so for a group of students with the diverse backgrounds expected of students entering the program. If carefully designed this highly ambitious experiment in graduate laboratory work could be a cornerstone of a new way of thinking about interdisciplinary training, which could be extended to other universities and other programs. However, it is clear that there are practical issues, e.g., length of time of produce workable mutants, familiarity with simple chemical synthetic manipulations, etc., which need to be more carefully thought out. In both of these formal course experiences it is important that the ASU administration has agreed to add the proposed activities to the portfolio of courses currently offered so that the assignment to either of these courses does not come as an overload, which would detract from the overall effectiveness of the faculty member involved. The seminar program aims to place students in real contact with a variety of external experts and should prove to be a valuable addition to the formal training program. Students, under direction of the course director, are to carefully read and discuss the work of a selected set of speakers prior to their talks and should be well-poised to benefit from the on-campus presence of the speaker. In addition the multidisciplinary project meetings should be extremely positive experiences for the students in the program. These meetings which will have the character of an extended group meeting promise to allow students from diverse backgrounds to delve into details of a research problem on a common footing but from their own different perspectives. In short they are, just the kind of experience many of them are likely to have as parts of research teams in the industrial environment upon graduation. Recruitment/Woodbury This is an ambitious program that will need a very high quality of students that have a broad background and much curiosity, ambition, and drive. Recruitment into the program will occur at two levels. In one, students will be attracted to come to A.S.U. because they want to come into this program. However, students will also be recruited out of the current pool of general applicants to science and engineering. The goal is to attract 6 students per year from 5 departments (3 in arts and sciences and 2 in the school of engineering). There is no provision for students to transfer into the program after their first year in graduate school. Standard recruitment strategies are largely in place. There are good, innovative programs for attracting minority students. The current enrollment has a high proportion of students that are eligible for support by N.S.F. There is good faculty commitment to recruiting visits. The college makes an investment in bringing students in to visit the college. They have mechanisms to contact applicant that they hope to attract by email during the time the students are making their decision. Current students talk of being attracted to the university by coming on visits and meeting interested faculty. This program, by the excitement of the intellectual offerings it provides should prove help them ensure that the best students accept offers at A.S.U. The difficulty is to find entry level students that are interested in this particular program. The average A.S.U. graduate student might not be interested in this ambitious program. However, the faculty quality is more than sufficient and there is a number of students in the existing program who would meet the ambitious needs of the program. They will need to get a few of the most ambitious students from each of the 5 departments to join the program. One challenge may be to make sure that the allocation of training positions is spread out equitably among the departments. Thus, recruitment will require students to be directed to this unusual and exciting program. Recruitment of students of students may be best achieved by word of mouth within the scientific community. The visiting scientist component of the grant can also serve as a recruitment mechanism, since when colleagues return to their home institutions they will send their best students. However, in order to maintain the right students it will be important to maintain program's focus so that this remains a high visibility offering at A.S.U.