An award was made to the University of Washington to provide research training for 10 weeks for 10 students, for the summers of 2010-2012. This award is also supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE) in the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO). This research experience is designed to increase ocean literacy and familiarity with the marine environment within the framework of an all encompassing scientific community that will offer a full career's worth of support and guidance. The University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories will offer an excellent environment in which to study the integrative biology and ecology of marine organisms. The labs are on San Juan Island and offer a variety of pristine and impacted intertidal and subtidal habitats that will serve as the platform for student projects. Participants recruited from the national pool of undergraduates will take advantage of this coastal environment and the diversity of research approaches at the labs to engage in truly interdisciplinary work. The program includes research mentoring and also formal training in the tools needed to become a biologist, including ethics and the responsible conduct of research, science writing, presentation, and outreach. Students are expected to engage in one-on-one research at the labs for the entire 10 week program, during which they will also participate in exercises designed to further their development. The broader impacts of this program are at many levels: the labs will benefit from these energetic young people bringing new ideas, and the program will make the labs more attractive to investigators using our facilities. This program will build on the success of the Laboratories' underrepresented minority mentoring program by offering more students an opportunity to participate. The educational, career development and team building aspects of the program will be tracked to show the lasting effects on student participants who will be assessed with a common assessment tool. Contact Scott Schwinge (schwinge@uw.edu), Adam Summers (fishguy@uw.edu) or Emily Carrington (ecarring@uw.edu) for more information about the program. Or, visit the website at http://depts.washington.edu/fhl/REU.html.
Our Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site program at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories achieved our goal of providing a framework for young scientists to make the transition to graduate school and beyond. The program supported more than 40 students from a diversity of ethnic, social and scholastic backgrounds in a residential program with one on one mentoring in independent research. These undergraduates have gone on to give more than 25 presentations at national meetings on their research. They have published more than 7 peer reviewed papers, including a cover article in Plankton Research and a high profile paper in the Royal Society – Interfaces journal. The NSF supports the very best graduate students with a highly competitive graduate research fellowship (GFRP) and alumni of our REU program successfully competed for these fellowships. In one year class five of fourteen students now supported on GFRPs and at least two others from other years have been awarded. More than 70% of the REU students who have finished their undergraduate degrees are now in or have graduated from graduate school. The program recruited mentors from a diversity of fields – biology, oceanography, fisheries, and forestry, as well as institutions across the spectrum from research driven universities to colleges with strong undergraduate research components and government agencies with a research mission. We continue to track the success of the program alumni and stay in touch with every participant in the program through social media. In addition to allowing us to track progress and offer continued support the social media platform has led to significant inter cohort support, collaboration and continued contact among alumni. In one case the data gathered with an REU student led to a funded NSF research grant for the mentor as well as publications with the student as first and second author.
