Founded in 1892, The Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) Physiology Course is one of the oldest, continually-running biology courses in the World. This training course remains a "Gold Standard" for bringing together faculty, and students selected from a highly qualified pool, across many disciplines in the life sciences. The instructors work closely as a cohesive team to educate early-career biologists, many of whom go on to make their own ground-breaking discoveries. The MBL Physiology Course fosters a unique training environment that uses cellular, molecular, and physical principles of biology to understand living organisms. This NSF award will be used to integrate cellular and genomic science with principles and practices of organismal and evolutionary biology. Faculty and students will combine their unique perspectives to problem solving in physiology. By so doing, a deeper understanding of the physiological principles of "How Life Works" will be attained and integrated across biological subdisciplines. To extend the learning experience beyond the time that each trainee spends at the MBL, instructors in the MBL Physiology Course will invite and support teams of students to continue to work together after they return to their respective research groups at their home institutions. Through this post-course experience, each participant will have the opportunity to engage and educate the general public regarding fundamental principles of living organisms, related to the societal importance of new knowledge and discovery in the life sciences.
The MBL Physiology Course provides intensive training and research experiences at critical intersections of cell biology and physical science - ranging from molecular biology, genetics, genomics, to evolutionary biology. The course begins with an intensive "Boot Camp," when biologists, physicists, and all students become familiar with cutting-edge techniques in cellular anatomy and physiology, fabrication, bioinformatics, while working together to analyze big data sets. The revised MBL Physiology Course will now incorporate interactions with three other concurrent summer courses to bring physiology "back into the organism" and challenge students to consider cells in their natural contexts. Intentionally bringing students together from the Physiology, Microbial Diversity, Embryology, and Biology of Parasites courses will provide opportunities for synergism of ideas and expanded multidisciplinary perspectives inherent in this horizontal integration across biological subdisciplines. The MBL Physiology Course trains a diverse student body, with specific attention given to the recruitment and support of under-represented groups in STEM. In addition, the course will aid students in disseminating techniques and concepts via support of organized groups at the students' home institutions and at scientific conferences.
This award is cofunded by the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
