Intellectual merit. The goal of this grant is to film lectures from leading biologists and make them available to students and researchers free-of-charge though a web site called "iBioSeminars.org." Lectures provide a critical supplement to research papers and textbooks, since they better convey how scientists approach problems and illustrate the scientific method for making discoveries. Listening to a famous scientist talk in person is a great learning opportunity, but such opportunities are often restricted to the elite US universities and institutes. Many universities and small colleges have limited access to top scientists, either due to lack of travel funds for inviting speakers or the limited time of "high profile" speakers. The goal of this endeavor is to make the research, opinions, and teachings of great biologists more widely accessible to any student or researcher who has access to the web. Through NSF support, the project will produce >20 iBioSeminars (each ~90 min) per year and >40 shorter iBioMagazine videos (<15 min) that reach out to students and young scientists (college to postdoc level), providing them with insight into how important scientific discoveries are made, career advice, and discussions of science policy. The project also will provide additional teaching materials that allow educators to incorporate the video seminars into the classroom.
Broader impacts. The project has been piloted with great success, posting approximately 85 taped talks to date and having 1.8 million downloads in 148 countries or territories in the last two years. With NSF support, the impact of the series will be broadened by recruitment of speakers who represent the full breadth of biology (e.g. ecology, evolution, plant sciences, computational biology), more international scientists, as well as underrepresented minorities. Efforts will be increased to disseminate this resource to more educators in small US colleges, community colleges, high schools, and foreign universities. At the same time, the series will be made more accessible to the international scientific community by providing subtitles for the talks in English, as well as other languages. Working with educators will improve "teaching tools" content and will help to inform how iBioSeminars can be used most effectively in the classroom, and to stimulate the interest of students in science. The iBioSeminars project enables students to "meet" and be taught by some of the major life science researchers in the world, which allows them to feel the excitement of scientific research in a way that cannot be captured in a textbook. In addition, more senior scientists can learn about research from scientists who may not visit their universities and thus gain ideas that might stimulate new thinking and discoveries.
