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。除了将研究和教育结合起来之外，它还具有科学和社会效益。心理学和神经科学博士学位授予人数不足的少数群体--少数族裔、低收入群体和第一代大学生--的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)的心理学研究体验项目(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，即研究体验是吸引和留住学生进入科学和工程领域并为他们在这些领域的职业生涯做准备的最有效的途径之一。事实上，在2011-2020年度的74名Prep校友中，三分之二的人目前都是博士后研究员，攻读STEM学科的研究生课程，从事后BAC研究活动，为申请研究生院做准备，或者完成STEM专业的本科学业。Prep每年夏季举行10周，在此期间，学生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。每个预科学生在心理学系或附属于心理学系的实验室里进行他们的研究项目。他们接受实验室首席研究员的指导，以及该实验室研究生或博士后研究员的日常监督。每周的数据科学研讨会由华盛顿大学NSF研究培训计划(NRT)的教职员工和实习生领导，该计划侧重于学习、理解、认知、智力和数据科学(LUID)。每周一次的职业发展课程由心理学系的一组教师轮流主持。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。这项调查是通过对威斯康星大学的教职员工进行调查得出的，内容是当你为自己的实验室招收研究生时，你需要具备哪些特质？在接受调查的所有教职员工中，普遍的回答是以前有过技术技能的经验。不同实验室的具体要求各不相同，但最常列出的是便于编程，例如在matlab、python和/或R环境中。更广泛地说，在心理学和神经科学的几乎所有领域，一个趋势是对数据科学的日益重视。在某些领域，它是数据挖掘和元分析。在一些情况下，它是大规模的数据收集，例如亚马逊的机械土耳其人基于互联网的研究。在神经科学中，人们越来越认识到，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学分支的方法正越来越多地被应用于这种“大数据”。PREP的组织结构反映了PREP REU和清晰的NRT之间的密切联系。在行政方面，自2011年以来一直担任这一职务的主计长/筹备主任布拉德利·波斯尔与该部的助理助理蒂莫西·罗杰斯一起担任这一职务。他同时也是Cleid的PI/董事。一名项目协调员协助主任处理春季学期的入学事宜，在学员前往麦迪逊并居住在REU的住宿部分时管理后勤和学生生活，并跟踪项目校友。方案协调员还与信息技术合作委员会密切合作，组织每周数据科学讲习班。该计划的指导组织结构将每个预科学生与三名导师配对：一名教师导师，是心理学系或Lucid其他核心系(计算机科学、电气和计算机工程、教育心理学)的终身/终身跟踪/或PI状态的教员；一名研究导师，是负责预科学生日常研究指导的研究生或博士后研究员；以及一名校友导师，是PREP的校友/校友。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.