NRT-HDR: Science Museums Advance Research and Training through Convergence of Objects, Data, and Inference

这个国家科学基金会研究培训（NRT）奖以新墨西哥大学科学博物馆为中心，以新的研究生教育模式吸引教师和学生。该项目使学员能够从人类学、生物学和地质学博物馆的藏品中获得新的知识，这将使有关自然、物理和人类系统如何随时间和空间变化的多学科研究成为可能。研究的中心目标是了解美国西南部干旱地区过去的变化，以及包括不同人类社区在内的生命如何应对未来气候和水资源的变化。通过研究和教育活动，学员将利用数据科学和尖端技术，如高分辨率图像分析、DNA测序和信息学以及元素化学，提高博物馆文物和藏品的信息价值。这些资料将与关于生物多样性和社会或自然系统的数据相结合，目的是描述和模拟环境和文化多样化区域对环境和地质变化的生物和文化反应。教师和学生的研究团队将共同研究气候变化对人类和自然的耦合影响、旱地的水动力学、景观转变对生态系统过程的影响，以及基于对象的信息与大规模数据基础设施的分析联系。该奖项使教育、培训和指导活动能够招募和培训具有独特交叉专业知识的各种专业人员，并直接支持40名硕士和博士级别的学员，并将项目元素和福利扩展到35名研究生（总共75名）和40名本科生。这个以博物馆为基础的NRT项目解决了重大的学术、结构和文化障碍，这些障碍阻碍了基础和应用对象研究的跨学科倡议。科学收集的伦理理由和美国在建立物理材料收集方面所做的大量基础设施投资的长期支持，围绕着它们在回答对社会福祉至关重要的科学问题方面的效用。研究和教育活动包括通过将共享时间和地点的物品连接到扩展对象网络（EON）中来放大博物馆物品的信息价值。EON框架跨越多个集合，整合了生物多样性、社会和物理系统数据库，以促进对环境变化的生物和文化响应的描述、测试和建模。该计划为学生的职业生涯做好准备，需要：(1)理解或设计环境或社会/经济相关的研究，利用科学收藏；(2)创新和有效地利用博物馆的教育资源；(3)与更广泛的环境研究和政策团体合作；(4)有效地在协作团队中工作，包括发展指导技能。项目内容包括在跨博物馆的环境中进行共同指导，整合跨学科认识论系统的模块化课程，提供对计算和数据集成的一般和专业见解的活动，以及影响博物馆收藏和基于收藏的研究的伦理问题的培训。研究和培训主题的地理焦点是美国西南部，这是一个拥有丰富文化和自然历史以及众所周知的环境变化历史的地区。这种基于地点的研究使受训者能够深入研究复杂的问题，并且在接触代表性不足的学生方面特别有效，因为这与他们自己的生活、经历和社区有关。通过与外部非学术合作伙伴和主题相似的nrt的互动，该项目为在科学、政策和资源管理方面发挥重要作用的学员创造了通往多种职业的途径。美国国家科学基金会研究实习生（NRT）计划旨在鼓励开发和实施大胆的、具有潜在变革性的STEM研究生教育培训新模式。该项目致力于通过创新、循证、适应不断变化的劳动力和研究需求的综合培训模式，在高优先级跨学科或融合研究领域对STEM研究生进行有效培训。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award engages faculty and students in a new graduate education model centered in the science museums at the University of New Mexico. The program enables trainees to generate new knowledge about objects from anthropological, biological, and geological museum collections, that will enable multidisciplinary research about how natural, physical, and human systems change through time and space. A central goal will be to understand past changes in the arid Southwestern United States through time, and how life, including diverse human communities, might respond to future changes in climate and water availability. Through research and educational activities, trainees will enhance the informational value of museum objects and collections by harnessing data science and cutting-edge techniques such as high-resolution image analysis, DNA sequencing and informatics, and elemental chemistry. This information will be intersected with data on biodiversity and social or physical systems, with the aim to describe and model biological and cultural responses to environmental and geological change in an environmentally and culturally diverse region. Working together, faculty and student research teams will address coupled human-natural impacts of climate change, water dynamics in drylands, effects of landscape transformation on ecosystem processes, and analytical linkages of object-based information with large-scale data infrastructure. This award enables education, training, and mentoring activities to recruit and train a diverse set of professionals with unique intersectional expertise, and directly supports 40 trainees at the MS and PhD levels, and extends program elements and benefits to 35 additional graduate (75 total) and 40 undergraduate students.This museum-based NRT program addresses significant academic, structural, and cultural barriers that hinder cross-disciplinary initiatives in basic and applied object-based research. Ethical justification for scientific collecting and long-term support of the vast infrastructural investment that the US has made in building collections of physical materials revolves around their utility for answering scientific questions that are critical for societal well-being. Research and education activities include amplifying the information value of museum objects by linking those that share times and places into an Extended Object Network (EON). The EON framework spans across collections, incorporates biodiversity, social, and physical system databases to facilitate the description, testing, and modeling of biological and cultural responses to environmental change. The program prepares students for careers that require: (1) understanding or designing environment- or socio/economic-related research that leverages scientific collections; (2) innovative and effective use of museum resources in educational settings; (3) engaging the broader environmental research and policy community; and, (4) effectively working in collaborative teams, including development of mentoring skills. Program elements include co-mentorship in a cross-museum setting, modular courses that converge epistemological systems across disciplines, activities that provide both generalized and specialized insights into computation and data integration, and training in ethical issues affecting museums collecting and collections-based research. The geographic focus of research and training themes is the American Southwest, a region with rich cultural and natural histories and a well-known history of environmental change. Such place-based research allows trainees to dig into complex problems and is particularly effective at reaching underrepresented students because it is relevant to their own lives, experiences, and communities. Through interactions with external non-academic partners and thematically similar NRTs, this program creates pathways to several careers for trainees who have vital roles to play in science, policy, and resource management. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.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.