Author: Shawn Gaillard

The first meeting of NIGMS Division of Training, Workforce Development, and Diversity (TWD) grantees will be held on June 12-15, 2012, in San Antonio, Texas. The meeting will provide TWD grantees with the opportunity to meet NIGMS program, review and grants management staff as well as incoming NIGMS Director Chris Kaiser.

General sessions planned for this year’s meeting include discussions about the Institute’s strategic plan for training and the vision of the new TWD division. There will also be “how to” sessions on various topics such as developing an evaluation plan, helping students transition to training programs at research-intensive institutions, and building effective business offices for managing TWD grants.

The 2012 meeting is intended for grantees of the following student and postdoctoral development programs:

• Predoctoral T32 training programs
• IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence
• Bridges to the Baccalaureate
• Bridges to the Doctorate
• Initiative for Maximizing Student Development
• Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award
• MARC Ancillary Training Activities
• MARC Undergraduate Student Training in Academic Research Award
• Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program
• Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement

Meeting registration is open until May 14, but seating is limited, so we encourage you to sign up soon.

We hope to see you in June!

As part of our commitment to developing a diverse scientific workforce, we sponsor the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) national conference  and the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) .

These conferences represent two of the largest gatherings of science and math undergraduate students from groups that are underrepresented in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. They are terrific opportunities for you to meet and recruit outstanding students. You also can volunteer to mentor students or judge their posters.

This year, SACNAS will meet in San Jose, CA, October 27-30, and ABRCMS in St. Louis, MO, November 9-12. For more information or to register, visit the meeting Web sites.

This fall, NIGMS will be sponsoring the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) national conference in Anaheim, CA, September 30-October 3, and the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) in Charlotte, NC, November 10-13.

These meetings present two wonderful opportunities for you to meet and recruit science-oriented undergraduate students from groups that are underrepresented in the biomedical sciences. In addition to listening to research talks, you can volunteer to mentor students during the meeting or judge their posters. For those of you who are MORE program directors, you’ll also be able to support your students.

I encourage you to attend one or both of these meetings, as they bring in some of the best and brightest undergraduate students in the nation.

You can visit NIGMS staff at SACNAS exhibit booth 817 or ABRCMS exhibit booth 700.

For additional information or to register as a meeting participant, mentor and/or judge, visit the SACNAS  and ABRCMS  Websites.

Last month, I attended the “Beyond Bio2010” conference held at the National Academy of Sciences. The meeting highlighted the progress made in implementing the Bio2010  recommendations, chiefly to transform undergraduate biology education by using the quantitative sciences (mathematics, chemistry, physics, engineering and computer sciences) to study biology and vice versa.

The 2-day meeting, which was held in the same room that the Bio2010 report was publically released in 2002, primarily consisted of teams of biology, math and computer sciences faculty discussing strategies used by their institutions to reform science curricula. Among the efforts that really caught my attention were those that:

• Assessed student learning outcomes and showed improvement as a result of integrating math, physics, chemistry and computer science into biology;
• Established new interdisciplinary majors or minors in areas like bioinformatics;
• Described efforts to break down “departmental silos” through collaborations among biology, math, chemistry and other faculty;
• Trained faculty for an integrated pedagogical approach (for a resource, see The National Academies Summer  Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology); and
• Discussed the need for the administration to formally recognize faculty who reformed the curricula.

In addition, I presented a summary of NIGMS-supported efforts, namely the MARC Curricular Improvement grant, a competitive mechanism for eligible institutions to implement Bio2010 recommendations. The inclusion of all undergraduate students, with a focus on historically unrepresented populations, was a significant theme of the conference. In fact, I was delighted to see one of our MARC Curricular Improvement grantees from the University of Puerto Rico talk about her institution’s efforts on this front.

A unique feature of the conference was that several undergraduate students also presented posters on their interdisciplinary biology and mathematics research. Their posters showed math majors collecting samples in a stream and biology majors performing mathematical modeling. A faculty attendee at the conference noted that when he walked around and listened to the student presenters, he really could not figure out who was a math major and who was a biology major—a desired outcome of Bio2010!

If you are interested in finding more details about “Beyond Bio2010,” a report of the conference is slated to be published in the Fall 2010 issue of CBE—Life Sciences Education .