This award provides support for a three year continuing award, a renewal of the NIBIB-NSF Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institutes (BBSI) Program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), entitled, BBSI: The Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Summer Institute at VCU, under the direction of Dr. Gregory A. Buck. The VCU BBSI will continue to provide broad exposure to the interdisciplinary fields of bioengineering and bioinformatics for approximately 22 (12-14 entering and 10-12 returning) upper level undergraduate students, each summer for ten weeks. A total of 66 students will be supported by this program over the next three years. The goal of the VCU BBSI is to show future engineers and scientists that the integrative interdisciplinary fields of bioinformatics and bioengineering represent exciting, rewarding, and very viable long term options for a career in research.
The intellectual focus of the VCU BBSI will be to lead students through a series of highly integrated intensive research simulations, inspired by actual problems from their VCU host laboratories over a two successive summer programs. Core skills such as computational and mathematical methods integrate, across disciplines and research areas, the analytical and methodological skills of the Institute participants. Students will also interact with the scientific community through carefully prepared experiences with visiting scientists and engineers. Students will also take primary responsibility for their research projects and delve more deeply into the scientific basis of their work by teaching their peers.
The broader impact of the VCU BBSI is seen in its efforts to integrate cutting-edge research and educational experience through recently launched comprehensive new Bachelor's and Master's Programs in Bioinformatics and a Bioinformatics track in the new Ph.D. in Integrative Life Sciences. The newly created School of Engineering is one of few in the country to focus on Bioengineering, and houses a newly focused department of Chemistry and Life Sciences Engineering.
This program is being co-funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO)/Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI)/Biological Databases and Informatics (BDI), the Directorate for Engineering (ENG)/Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), and the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). VCU has a tradition of training non-traditional and underrepresented populations, and that tradition is reflected in the goals of the BBSI.
The Virginia Commonwealth University Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Summer Institute (VCU-BBSI) sought from 2003 to 2010 to entice students into careers in bioinformatics or bioengineering by offering them experiences similar to what they might gain at a good graduate program. The Institute was designed to instill in participants a sense of competence, independence, responsibility, and involvement in both a local community of researchers and the greater community of those focused on a specific scientific problem. It did so by means of a guided research experience, one that directed participants to a meaningful engagement with research articles, with colleagues in their fields, and above all, with each other. Ten to fourteen undergraduates (primarily rising sophomores and juniors) were accepted into the program each summer, and 85% of them returned for a second summer at VCU funded by the program. From the start, the Institute pushed participants to gain an increasing level of responsibility over their engagement with science. They were responsible for the choice of their mentor, based largely on faculty presentations and discussions at an Opening Symposium. They learned how to gain a quick initial mastery over the literature in their chosen fields. They wrote proposals concerning their research and presented them to their peers. They heard the presentations of their peers and were responsible for pointing out areas that lacked clarity. They were responsible for small but important research budgets to support their research. They prepared frequent reports and presentations to make their work accessible to a wide audience. Many of the defining events of the Institute are summarized in Fig. 1. Perhaps the most lasting contribution of the Institute was its culture, which participants might carry with them long after they have left the VCU-BBSI. Participants lived together, had common trials, watched the trials of those further along their path, gained from the expertise of their colleagues and offered their own expertise in return, and learned that science is not confined to a classroom or lab but is a way of thinking that can become part of life. Culture cannot be imposed from without. The culture of the VCU-BBSI evolved in its first year and was subsequently passed down from one generation to the next, as is the norm in graduate school, by virtue of interactions between new participants and those returning for their second summers. The VCU-BBSI was virtually unique amongst undergraduate research programs in offering students a two-summer experience, essential for the perpetuation of the culture. One measure of the efficacy of the Institute is the fates of its participants (Fig. 2). Confining the analysis to the VCU-BBSI classes in which the majority of participants had obtained undergraduate degrees by Spring 2011 and to those whose fate afterwards is known, 56% of alumni went on to research-oriented graduate programs, with another 5% enrolling in a medical professional school. 17% postponed a career decision (e.g. most commonly in a lab tech position), and another 17% found science-related jobs.
