This REU Site award to the University of Georgia, located in Athens, Georgia, will support the training of 10 students for 9 weeks during the summers of 2015-2017. This program will introduce undergraduates to areas of microbial research and increase their awareness of careers in microbiology. Students from groups that are underrepresented in the scientific community, including deaf and hard-of-hearing students and ethnic minorities, are encouraged to participate in the program. REU participants conduct independent projects under the supervision of faculty mentors residing in several Departments including, but not limited to: Microbiology, Marine Sciences, and Infectious Diseases. All provide a variety of research topics that address the functions of prokaryotic organisms. Current techniques will be used in interdisciplinary approaches that combine knowledge from the fields of Genetics, Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Physiology, Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology and Ecology. Research projects will address broad questions including the role of prokaryotes in environmental and geochemical processes. Participants will attend workshops to become familiar with graduate school application and careers in microbiology. Student applications are submitted electronically through the program website. Competitive students will be selected by a committee of faculty. Participants will assess the quality of the REU program by use of a common assessment tool (SALG URSSA).
It is anticipated that a total of 30 students, primarily from schools with limited research opportunities, will be trained in the program. Students will learn how research is conducted, and many will present the results of their work at scientific conferences. Furthermore, students will have informal meetings with faculty, attend scientific seminars, participate in discussions of ethical issues in science, and join the regular research meetings of their lab groups. Students will present their research results at the end of the summer in a poster session.
Students are required to be tracked after the program and must respond to an automatic email sent via the NSF reporting system. More information is available by visiting http://mib.uga.edu/programs, or by contacting the PI (Dr. Vincent J. Starai at vjstarai@uga.edu) or the co-PI (Dr. Diana Downs at dmdowns@uga.edu).
