Scientists from Colorado School of Mines and University of Southern California have received funding to partially support the International Geobilogy Summer course. The goal of this activity is to engage graduate students with different academic backgrounds in Geobiology research merging organic and inorganic chemistry, micro and molecular biology, physics, and geology. Guided by senior researchers, participants will examine processes at the interface of geology and biology and explore the evidence that life's processes have left in the rock record. It is expected that 20 students and 20 instructors will participate each year in research projects that are founded on theoretical, field, and lab work. The course will last for 4-5 weeks; during this time, participants will spend time in the field, at Colorado School of Mines (supported by this grant), and at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies on Catalina Island, California. Expected outcomes will include conference presentations and publications as a result of the research efforts and new collaborations. An advisory committee, 3-6 senior scientists, will assist in selecting the research themes each year. Additional funding sources include the Agouron Institute, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and NASA.
2014 marked the 11th International Geobiology Course, and the impact of the course on the field of Geobiology is clear, particularly over the 2010 – 2014 timeframe of this NSF grant. Over these past five years we have graduated 85 students from the course. We have seen the course transition from a vehicle to help define an emerging field to a critical right of passage for the next generation of geobiologists, now demonstrated by alumni sending their own students to the course (in 2014, over 30% of the students chosen to participate in the were students of past alumni, demonstrating the importance of the course to past participants and their desire to have their own students benefit from a similar experience). The research-driven, team-oriented pedagogy, a fundamental part of the course for many years, was again successfully implemented as demonstrated by the outstanding student reviews as well as real research productivity (including eight abstracts submitted to professional meetings originating from the student research teams). The basic structure of the course begins with a field trip and includes field sampling, lectures, instructed experiments, discussion of scientific ethics, group research opportunities, and lectures by visiting scientists. In 2014 for example, the course began at the University of Southern California with 16 graduate students from six different countries. As in past years, we began with a field trip, this time up the east side of California to Mammoth Lakes, California for research work on the microbial mats of a hotspring, followed by travel to Walker Lake, Nevada for research work on stromatolites. From the first day, the students are exposed to the research questions that become the foundation of our team-oriented, research-based curriculum. Regardless of the specific techniques taught or learned, it is critically important to learn how to ask the right questions. Asking the right question is even more important in an interdisciplinary field like geobiology where geologists learn microbiology and microbiologists learn geology. Thus, the fundamental over-arching learning objective of the course is to learn to see the critical gaps in our knowledge and find ways to address them. Here, students from different disciplines (geology, biology, geochemistry, genetics, etc.) learn to speak the language of the others by interacting. In doing so, the students grasp what questions are important to the other disciplines, and what their unique perspective and background might bring to the situation--the nature of interdisciplinary research. Hence, the current course is highly team based, where students learn as much from each other as they do from the instructors, and they learn how to ask the right questions. Over these past five years, we have realized that Geobiology as a topic, is so diverse it would be difficult to teach every single topic or skill during the course. Therefore, we focus on learning objectives that can carry the students beyond the course, including: Encouraging exploration into fields outside of their expertise or comfort zone; Building confidence in cross-disciplinary scientific communication and a mutual understanding of each other’s scientific fields; Motivating students for discovery-oriented and hypothesis-driven experimental work; Teaching students how to ask research questions and define approaches to find answers; Introducing cutting-edge analytical techniques; Exposing participants to concepts in the geobiological sciences and to the views (sometimes opposing) of those who represent them; Discussing scientific ethics, especially with respect to working in groups, and assessing what constitutes scientific contribution to a project; Providing instruction regarding the best approaches to scientific talks and posters; Establishing contacts with and instruction by world-class scientists; 10. Initiating future collaborations while opening the minds of young scientists. With input from the course instructors and other experts in the field, key objectives are discussed in advance and implemented during the course. For example, it is clear that modern molecular tools, especially next-generation DNA sequencing with subsequent bioinformatics, have become a critical area for solving geobiologic problems. It is equally apparent that geobiology should have some fundamental grounding in the rock record. The choice of field sites and research projects stems from these key objectives. And while it would be impossible to teach every geobiologically-relevant technique, there is a cadre of techniques that every geobiologist should know. Both the course instructors and other experts can impart the ‘core-knowledge’ and the wherewithal to obtain and better understand the other techniques that they may need in the future. It is clear, 12 years down the line from the first GeoBiology summer course, that the course maintains an important role building the geobiology community. The record of academic placements of course alumni is impressive and growing, and the alumni, now new faculty themselves, view the course as essential for their new students. All, are thankful and appreciative of the National Science Foundation for the support of the course!
