A National Introductory Colloquium and Undergraduate Research Experience in Mathematical Biology

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

This program will provide virtual colloquia for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that include robust scientific discussions and interactions between the speaker and the students and between the students at the different HBCUs. Additionally, this proposal aims to impact both the students and the faculty members at HBCUs. By engaging the HBCU faculty members as partners in the project, the goal is to create pipelines for the HBCU students to graduate schools and to establish and enhance working relationships and networking between HBCU faculty members and faculty members at large research institutions. If these two innovative ideas are successful, they will have a broad impact. This research project emphasizes mathematical biology, but the same ideas should work in other branches of pure and applied mathematics, and in other scientific disciplines as well. In making the virtual colloquia as interactive as a classroom, the project will have created a template for faculty at other research universities to participate in and enhance the training of undergraduates at HBCUs, and that, in and of itself, will create pipelines from the HBCUs to the research institutions, both for students and for faculty. The methods and the template could then be used by other groups of mathematicians or scientists to enhance the training of students at the other HBCUs at low cost. The project has three goals: to encourage undergraduate students at the HBCUs to go to graduate school in the STEM disciplines; to connect faculty in analysis and mathematical biology at the HBCUs to faculty and research programs at The Ohio State University (OSU) and other large research institutions; to experiment with virtual colloquia and virtual teaching techniques in mathematics. Faculty members at six HBCUs will each recruit 2-3 students to participate in the year-long program that includes a meet-and-greet workshop at Howard University, where they will meet the PIs and some of the speakers and hear mathematical biology lectures. Through the academic year, the students receive 7 introductory colloquia in which the speakers sit in their home office and the broadband facilities of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) are used to broadcast the colloquium simultaneously to the six HBCUs. The MBI facilities permit questions and answers and discussions in real time during the talk. Materials prepared by the speakers provide follow-up activities that will be mentored by the local faculty members. The year concludes with a 10-day workshop at OSU that will be both a research experience for the students and collaboration events for the faculty. For the students, there will be panel discussions on academic and non-academic jobs and graduate school. For faculty research engagement, ten mathematical biology faculty members at OSU, in addition to some speakers, have agreed to include an HBCU faculty member in their current research program. 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.