The speed of advancement in data-rich biomedical sciences is limited in part by the lack of awareness and expertise in big data sets and tools, the absence of approaches that productively intersect disparate domains, and the underrepresentation of diverse groups in the workforce. To address these disparities, we propose CREEDS: Community Research Education and Engagement for Data Science. This title represents our commitment to our overall goal of fostering practical skills for a national, diverse and interdisciplinary community of early career researchers. Our three specific aims are: (1) to provide biomedical researchers with the practical skills and insight needed to harness the power and advance the promise of big data science to accelerate scientific discovery, (2) to develop an online social environment to facilitate the exchange of big data ideas, approaches and techniques between novices and experts, and (3) to enhance the diversity of the biomedical big data workforce through targeted recruitment and retention of disadvantaged and underrepresented student populations. We will personally engage 150 graduate students through an intensive, self-tailored, two-week summer school in NYC that will showcase interesting, and current, collaborative case studies in activities at schools throughout NYC. It wil also include training in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Participants will employ active learning techniques to develop their skills of specific new methods and tools through both individual and group tasks on real-life large data sets. The training will raise the skills of students of varied backgrounds to a sufficient level for additional graduate research and will not require any prior computing experience. Students will also receive experience and materials to help them teach others when they return to their home institutions. Additionally, we will mentor another 30 NYC-based graduate students for team participation in four month long DREAM challenges. The DREAM challenge teams will help develop computational skills on solving difficult, real-life biomedical problems. An online social environment, Kipin Hall, will enable participants to discover job opportunities, find data sources and tools and communicate with peers as well as big data experts. We will leverage our extant relationships with organizations serving underrepresented groups to boost participation and enhance this exciting field. To continually improve our program we will actively seek and respond to feedback from our participants, program faculty and our advisory panel. As a result of this project, we will train ovr 180 people to develop team skills to understand, select and use genomics data tools and approaches. We will reach more individuals by placing the summer school on Coursera. Armed with this knowledge, we plan that the next generation of genomics scientists will be better placed to design, analyze and interpret high-throughput genomics datasets. This is the important need for research education that we aim to address with CREEDS.
CREEDS will advance research education by providing, (a) an intensive, practical summer school experience in computational genomics for graduate students, (b) team challenges and problem solving to tackle real-life biomedical questions for graduate students, (c) an online collaboration environment, (d) the summer school available on open educational resources, and (e) active recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups.
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