Integrative Graduate
Education and
Research Traineeship

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IGERT-LifeChips Class Proposal Reveiw Assignment

Proposal Presentation

Projects:

IGERT: Life Chip

Institution:

University of California at Irvine

Primary Strategic Goal:

Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Secondary Strategic Goal:

Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.

Achievement/Results

The IGERT-LifeChips program continues to offer the Technology of Life and Technology for Life courses to LifeChips fellows, UCI graduate students, and UCI undergraduate students during the winter and spring quarters. As an important part of the course, students are required to submit a term paper that advocates an area of study or research in the life sciences. Students are instructed to write to a non-specialist audience with the intention of having their topic or field assessed by policy makers, university administrators, or government officials for appropriation of resources. Students are encouraged to view themselves as citizen scientist leaders who are given the task of promoting science to non-scientists and defending their science to detractors.

As an enhancement to the course, an additional component has been added to this assignment during this reporting period. Students are now given the opportunity to serve as a reviewer for another classmate?s proposal. Students are asked to listen closely to the research proposal presentations given by their colleagues. They are then instructed to pretend like they are a policy maker, university administrator, or government official who is assigned as the individual responsible for reviewing the proposal. Students are graded based upon their ability to do a number of things. They are asked to provide a brief summary of the review and what the author is proposing to do and include their thoughts on relevance, importance, innovation, and practicality. They are asked to provide feedback on intellectual merit of the proposed research activity. Students are told to describe the broader impacts of the proposed activity. And finally, the reviewers are asked to describe how they might collaborate with the lead investigator of the project in an interdisciplinary effort to improve upon the proposed method or recommend an alternative novel application of the proposed technique. Each reviewer then closes out his/her review with a summary of what they have learned from the class regarding preparation and presentation of research proposals, and their subsequent review.

Address Goals

The proposal review assignment promotes interdisciplinary learning by giving trainees the opportunity to use their knowledge base and expertise to add to the value of another student’s idea. The proposal review assignment also addresses the discovery goal by preparing trainees to present scientific reasearch ideas to the general public and promote science to non-scientific audiences.