End of Year Doings

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It’s graduation season across the California State University.  For faculty, staff and administrators on campus, it is a bittersweet experience. Students’ enthusiasm, creativity and eagerness fuel university classrooms, laboratories and projects.  But past the electricity students bring to campus, they are also scholars.  The familiar faculty lament goes something like, “…they are just now synthesizing all they’ve learned, they’ve become true collaborators, and now I have to say good-bye!”  My postdoc advisor was famously morose and sentimental each spring during “lab turnover” when undergraduates graduated, graduate students moved on to postdocs, and postdocs finally moved into jobs.  Letting go is hard.

The sweet part of graduation season is the pride we feel in students’ accomplishments and career trajectories.  Commencement signals the beginning of “annual reporting season” in the CSUPERB program office.  We’re reading final reports from the principal investigators and student scholars supported by CSUPERB grants and awards.  In these reports we find out “what’s next” for the graduating students.*  Every year these reports reignite my enthusiasm for higher education, even as my heart is heavy.

This graduation season the CSUPERB program office is a bit sadder than usual.  Zhazil, the student assistant who worked with us these past three years, is graduating from San Diego State University this weekend.  While we support over 400 students a year systemwide, we don’t actually get to see them all that often (and when we do, we see 300+ of them at the symposium all at once!)!  Zhazil represented the students’ perspective in the CSUPERB program office.  We’re going to miss her competence, her “can-do” attitude and the energy she brought to our quiet office.  We are certain she’ll excel in graduate school and wish her every success!

We are hoping our biotechnology graduates keep in touch with their mentors, their schools and CSUPERB.  We find that alums are proud of their CSU roots.  This week we’ve started recruiting CSU alums as speakers and participants at the 25th Annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium (January 4-5, 2013).  The enthusiastic response has overwhelmed (we need a four-day symposium!) CSUPERB and the faculty mentors involved. We have an incredible snapshot of where our graduates have gone, career-wise and science-wise since they left the CSU (CEO’s, professors, inventors; wireless health, drug development, crop improvement – all of biotechnology is represented!).  We look forward to a grand reunion.

 

*CSUPERB supported students are headed to graduate school and jobs at UC Davis, Genentech, St. Louis University, Harvard, the USDA, U. Massachusetts, Tufts, UCSF, among others. 

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Vision and Change Leadership Fellow Applications – Due July 9

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have banded together to fund 40 “Vision and Change (V&C) Leadership” Fellows this year.  I think CSUPERB-affiliated faculty and deans are highly qualified to apply and I hope one or more of them win a voice at the V&C table.

NIH, NSF and HHMI are collaboratively funding PULSE, an acronym for “Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education.” PULSE wants to “convene a group of 40 Vision and Change (V&C) Leadership Fellows. The V&C Fellows* will be thoughtful chairs, former chairs, deans or equivalent level faculty members who share a passion for undergraduate biology education, concern for its future, and the desire to act at the local and national levels. Fellows will participate in an exciting year-long facilitated process to identify solutions and prototype change. These outcomes will inform future investments by NSF, NIH and HHMI.”

It is that last italicized sentence (emphasis mine) that should catch your interest.  The possibility that these funding agencies and organizations might put (more) resources into undergraduate life science education is a very good thing, indeed.  Public, comprehensive, regional universities like the CSU are facing tremendous budgetary headwinds these days.  Even as policy makers strive to cut student costs by subsidizing tuition and providing low-cost loans, the campuses themselves face crippling budget cuts.  Any and all support for life sciences curriculum modernization, reform or re-design is welcome. Any investment in CSU students’ success on campus is welcome.

Public, comprehensive, regional universities, like the 23 CSU campuses, educate a large proportion of the life science undergraduates across the U.S.  The CSU educates 44% of the life science graduates in California.  After graduation many go on to graduate school, medical school, postdocs and faculty positions where they do compete successfully for NIH, NSF and HHMI funding (and jobs!).  That said, the NIH and NSF spend the majority of their training funds on post-baccalaureate education.** HHMI focuses science education funding on “research universities” and “leading researchers,” but also a select list of “undergraduate-focused colleges and universities.” The Committee for Economic Development recently advocated for greater support of regional comprehensive universities to answer the national call for more STEM graduates.  I sincerely hope a thoughtful, informed*** CSU faculty member is selected as a V&C Leadership Fellow to represent the “44% perspective” on undergraduate life science education.  Based on the cadre of CSUPERB faculty already involved in PKAL, CUR, HHMI, NSF and NIH supported activities, I am certain we have knowlegeable and eligible candidates!

 

* What will a V&C Fellow do or be?  The PULSE website includes an FAQ that outlines about  200 hours of service and activities over the year-long fellowship. Good luck, applicants!

**You’ve read it here before, but remember 80% of professionals working in the life science industry have bachelor’s or master’s degrees.  NIH and NSF focus on training future researchers (not patent lawyers, business development professionals or project managers), but I think the emphasis on training doctoral level researchers is still out of sync with the current academic and industrial job market.  

*** The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is hosting the Fellows competition.  AIBS is home to the Introductory Biology Project.  V&C Fellow applicants can hone their familiarity with authentic and participatory learning and learning research by checking out some of the literature at the CSUPERB website (including the 2011 Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education report).

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26 CSUPERB Travel Grants Announced

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Closing out the grant season here at CSUPERB, we’ve announced 26 travel grants to CSU students and faculty at 11 CSU universities.  The announcement listing all Student Travel Awards and Faculty Travel Awards is linked here.

As I discussed earlier in the spring, the application rates for these two programs exceeded all expectations.  Based on one round of data we can’t infer any kind of trend or point to any particular reason that we received so many travel grant proposals this spring.  Meanwhile I give credit to the FCG for effectively getting the word out on each campus about the opportunity.  This year we received proposals from 19 of the 23 CSU campuses.

The Faculty and Student Travel Grants can be used to travel to a biotechnology-related professional meeting or workshop. As a result CSU students and faculty are traveling to conferences across the U.S., Canada and even Denmark and China to present research findings and network with their scientific, engineering and math colleagues.

Two years ago we opened the program to CSU students and faculty who might need to travel to collect data or use specialized instrumentation.  This aspect of the travel grant program is still underused, in my opinion.  This summer Darragh Clancy, a San Francisco State University graduate student, will travel to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre in British Columbia.  She’ll use the Centre as a base from which to collect samples of Didemnum vexillum, a marine nuisance species. She’ll return to SFSU’s Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies and use genetic tools to study marine invasion dynamics and, perhaps, to “discover the sources and vectors bringing these unwanted new species to Alaska.”  Genetic methods are changing environmental management; Ms. Clancy and her advisor, Dr. Sarah Cohen, are working at the forefront of this rapidly changing field.  What a cool use of CSUPERB travel funds!

Safe travels to all and I can’t wait to read the final reports!

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CSUPERB’s 2012 Major Grant Awards Announced

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Emails have gone out to all the applicants who submitted proposals in response to CSUPERB’s “major” grant programs this spring.  These grant awards seed biotechnology research projects and curriculum development across the CSU.  The New Investigator and Research Development grants ($15,000) support faculty-student research projects.  We hope the preliminary data collection funded by these grants will help teams win (more) follow-on funding from other funding agencies.  The Joint Venture grants support joint projects between CSU faculty and an external partner(s).  Again, we hope these seed grants ($25,000, matched by partners) set these teams up for success. They are developing biotechnology product ideas, including tests to detect breast cancers and assistive technologies for veterans.  The Programmatic grants ($15,000) support the development of new, innovative courses designed to engage students in basic research, community-based research or service learning projects.

This spring we’re making awards totaling $570,000 to 35 faculty members on 15 CSU campuses state-wide. The list of 2012 award winners is linked here (.pdf).

We will send written reviews out to all applicants in the next day or two.  We sincerely hope the reviews offer helpful guidance and constructive ideas for improving proposals, even if applicants did not win awards this round.  The review committees take the process seriously.  70% of the reviewers have served on study sections at federal agencies so they have seen what kind of proposals are successful at that level as well.

Stay tuned – we’ll announce the Spring Travel Awards soon!

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Enriching Undergraduate Education

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Over the last 30 years the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and Project Kaleidoscope  (PKAL) members designed studies, authored papers, and issued reports that together established undergraduate research as a “well-developed, well-understood, well-integrated and essential component of a quality college education.”* As part of National Undergraduate Research Week, CUR hosted a webinar to raise awareness of their new report, “Characteristics of Excellence in Undergraduate Research.”  Yes, that translates into the acronym COEUR.  The COEUR report is a compilation of data and best practices related to “highly effective undergraduate research environments” and is available to CUR members.  As regular readers of this blog know, CSUPERB agrees that undergraduate research is the “heart” of a quality biotechnology education.

Despite monographs like COEUR, participatory (or discovery-based) learning is not as integrated into the undergraduate college curriculum as we’d like.  50 minute lectures by instructors are still offered on our campuses, especially in first and second year “introductory courses.”  Over the last five years, CSUPERB faculty (many of whom are CUR and PKAL participants) organized workshops to educate biotechnology faculty and administrators about engaged learning, online platforms and tools for individual learning, and research-based courses.  At this year’s symposium we turned the conversation to issues, challenges and barriers that campuses face in trying to enrich science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) undergraduate education.  Almost 100 CSU and CCC faculty, administrators and invited speakers attended the symposium workshop. I am slow at publishing meeting reports, but here (finally) is the workshop report.

Hopefully the opinions and recommendations in this informal workshop report are useful to campuses evaluating undergraduate STEM education. The report is not all-inclusive – there are many issues, challenges and barriers the CSUPERB workshop participants did not have time to discuss (When are new STEM faculty educated about effective teaching and research on learning? during postdocs? during new faculty orientation?). Read the COEUR report – among many others – for more perspectives.

CUR is on the minds of many within CSUPERB for another reason.  For the last five years Elizabeth (Beth) Ambos has been an effective advocate for student and faculty researchers across the CSU in her role as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research and Partnerships.  In May Beth is moving to Washington, D.C. to become Executive Director at CUR. She’s been a great friend, a steady counselor, a strategic thinker and a willing partner for over 30 (yes, I counted them!) CSUPERB projects. We can’t thank her enough for her support and encouragement. She will be greatly missed by me and the CSUPERB staff, faculty and administrators.  That said, it’s good to know she’ll have a “bully pulpit” from which to educate policy makers and faculty about the value and effectiveness of undergraduate research.

 

*MA Baenninger, Introduction, COEUR, Council on Undergraduate Research, 2012.

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2012 Presidents’ Commission Scholars Announced

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For the last couple of weeks the number one search term here at the CSUPERB blog has been “presidents commission scholars.”  We’ve also fielded calls from anxious and curious student and faculty applicants.   Yesterday award letters went out to 25 undergraduate researchers at 13 different CSU campuses.

The Presidents’ Commission Scholars will work with faculty mentors  and other student researchers this summer. The diversity of projects is fascinating. Students will explore infectious disease mechanisms, plant development, blue biotechnology, molecular diagnostic development, medical device design, and biofuel production.  The FCG has been particularly interested in building capacity system-wide for biofuels-related research; four of the Presidents’ Commission Scholars have biofuels projects queued up for the summer.

CSUPERB recognized that 98% of the undergraduates we funded last year were third and fourth year undergraduates.  Lopatto* and others have collected data indicating that students make the “greatest intellectual gains” if they get involved in faculty-mentored research projects early in their academic careers.  So we opened the Presidents’ Commission Scholars program to 1st, 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates.  In the proposals faculty mentors described a variety of clever recruiting strategies, including 10 minute recruiting pitches at the beginning of introductory chemistry and biology lectures.  As a result we’ve funded two freshmen and 11 sophomore researchers this summer. Eight of the scholars have not set foot in a research laboratory or worked with a research team before.  We sincerely hope these summer projects open doors, hone interests, build teams and inspire all involved.

 

*Lopatto, David. 2009. Science in Solution: the Impact of Undergraduate Research on Student Learning. Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

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Program Updates: SPC Election and Symposium Site Chosen

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We are happy to announce we’ve chosen a venue for the 25th Annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium!  The 2-3 day event (program pending!) will be January 3 – 5, 2013, at the Anaheim Marriott.  We’ve reserved space to hold a handful of workshops, task-force meetings and small group meetings Thursday, followed by the formal sessions all day Friday and Saturday. The 2013 symposium dates fall right after the New Year’s Holiday again this year, but the prices nearly doubled for a meeting held a week later. Mark your calendars now and save the dates!

Tuesday the first call for Strategic Planning Council (SPC) nominations went out to faculty serving on the CSUPERB Faculty Consensus Group (FCG).  Next week we’ll put the call out for new SPC Deans, as well. These two groups provide program direction and, together, form a sort of two-chamber congress for CSUPERB.  The faculty serving on the SPC are elected from and by the FCG.  Beyond governance, the SPC and FCG do all the “work” of CSUPERB!  They spread the word about CSUPERB grants and opportunities on their home campuses, review grant proposals, form task-forces, organize workshops, serve on award selection committees, and pretty much run the annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium behind-the-scenes.

In addition to all these tasks, the SPC members are “true believers” in CSUPERB’s mission.  These collaborative faculty leaders are gifted educators and scholars. They all believe “the best way to engage, recruit and retain students in life science careers is to provide access to and opportunities in real-world biotechnology research settings.”*   Each summer the SPC formulates the program’s operating budget to carry out our program goals.  With input from the FCG on what’s working and what’s not working, the SPC also sets the funding priorities that drive CSUPERB’s requests for proposals. The SPC stays up-to-date on educational innovations, scans the funding landscape for multi-campus grant opportunities, and partners to develop grant proposals.  This all takes a big-picture viewpoint (CSUPERB serves 23 campuses!), willingness to learn, partnering skills and creativity (along with some patience to let big things develop with time and practice!). It’s a collegial, multi-disciplinary group – so we’re hoping for a spirited, engaged, energized slate of nominees  this spring!

 

* This quote is obviously from CSUPERB’s new strategic plan. The SPC drafts the strategic plan for approval by the Presidents’ Commission and Chancellor Reed.

 

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Program Notes: Grant Programs and Strategic Plan

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I’m back after a vacation and there is a backlog of program news to report out!

In mid-March CSUPERB student and faculty Travel Grant and Presidents’ Commission Scholar proposals were due.  The application rates for these three programs exceeded all expectations.*  We received 88 travel grant proposals (~30% higher number of applications compared to any previous round).  We received 67 Presidents’ Commission Scholar proposals from 18 campuses, doubling the typical application numbers and campus participation in the Howell Scholars program, for comparison.  I think these numbers suggest we’re addressing an unmet, system-wide need with this new summer research program.  The down-side to this news, of course, is that the success rates ( or, “win rates”) might be lower than hoped for** this spring because our budget won’t stretch that much further.  Our goal is to partner with companies and national labs to expand the number of summer research opportunities in 2013.

That last point leads to the news that CSU Chancellor Reed approved the 2012-2015 CSUPERB Strategic Plan!  A link to the plan (*pdf) is here; the executive summary in slide deck format (*pdf) is here.

This new strategic plan puts an increased emphasis on partnering with companies, research institutions and national labs (= the “life science industry”) to increase CSUPERB’s impact. Between 2009-2012 we worked on being ”industry-responsive,” for instance, by developing new curriculum addressing workforce needs.  But we realize there is a greater need for student research opportunities than our biotechnology faculty labs can accommodate (the applications received for the Presidents’ Commission Scholars program are the “tip of the iceberg,” in my opinion). Going forward we would like to build on our industry relationships to form long-lasting partnerships to improve student learning and open new career opportunities.

The new plan also puts an increased emphasis on entrepreneurial education.  As part of the strategic planning process we surveyed the FCG, CSUPERB PIs and student award winners.  This survey, along with survey responses after previous CSU Biotechnology Symposia, revealed a desire among faculty and students to understand life science entrepreneurship better.  We aren’t aiming to start-up new companies, but we are aiming to build a more entrepreneurial culture across the CSU biotechnology community.  In simple terms this might be reflected in meaningful exchanges and partnerships between chemistry and biology faculty and students and their engineering and business*** colleagues. To get started we are expanding the I2P® Early-Stage Biotechnology Commercialization Challenge system-wide this year in hopes that interested faculty and students can get involved and learn about biotechnology commercialization.  While technology transfer and regional economic development are topics that higher education administrators and policy wonks think about,  CSUPERB’s new emphasis on entrepreneurial education is a result of increased faculty and student “grass roots” interest.

CSUPERB has crafted an ambitious agenda on limited resources and in the face of decreasing support for higher education in California.  It is clear the program’s leadership remains stubbornly optimistic, authentically student-centered and full of good will.  It seems certain to me that we will continue to do good for California and its students despite our challenges.

Notes:

*Another outcome associated with these remarkable application rates:  we used almost every volunteer in our spring pool of potential reviewers, suggesting we need to expand our reviewer pool yet again in coming years!

**All CSUPERB grant programs have had 25-35% success rates the past three years. The The FCG recommends that success rates [ = (# awards made) / (# applications received)] remain similar across all programs.  Their recommendation and an analysis of success rates each year drives our yearly budgeting process.

***…and their clinical, math and computer science colleagues as well!

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Entrepreneurial Education

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We just concluded a webinar about this year’s CSUPERB-I2P® Early-Stage Biotechnology Commercialization Challenge. Five campuses were on the call (not 23!?) this morning, representing entrepreneurial communities of faculty, staff and students.  After reviewing the rules and schedule for the competition, the campus reps swapped tips and suggestions for “success.” It’s pretty clear to me that the good-natured, collaborative banter was a red herring; there are serious, excited student teams lining up for this fall’s challenge already! I am eager to see how many teams email me with their intent to compete (by Sept. 28!).

Over the last five years, a sub-set of CSUPERB faculty and students asked over and over for more entrepreneurial education.  While worldwide interest in spinning out companies* based on university discoveries has been growing, the CSUPERB community articulated a more basic need.  Paraphrasing the most common question posed by biotechnology researchers, they wanted to know “What is needed to take a life sciences idea to a commercial product?” Motivated by the needs articulated by this entrepreneurial group of  researchers, CSUPERB piloted the I2P® challenge during Fall 2011.  A four-student team (2 engineers and 2 business majors) from CSU Sacramento won the competition after pitching their commercialization strategy for stem cell conditioning to judges at the 24th Annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium. All involved reported a marked increase in knowledge about life sciences commercialization, along with how to form and work in multi-disciplinary teams. As a result the CSUPERB Strategic Planning Council decided to back a system-wide competition in 2013.

The collegial group on the webinar this morning represented the enthusiasm of a “coalition of the willing.”  We’ll keep spreading the word about the CSUPERB – I2P® competition. Maybe we’ll hold another webinar in April if there is interest from those northern California teams that didn’t call in this morning!  As Warren Smith (CSU Sacramento and mentor to the winning 2012 competition team) put it, “it takes a village!”

 

 

*The WBT Innovation Marketplace will be held in San Diego this fall (October 24-26, 2012). The WBT brings together a “diverse group of more than 100 technology companies which will be selected by and present to over 100 seasoned venture investors and Fortune 500 licensing scouts representing a variety of industries, each supported by private funding, federal R&D grants or both,” according to the San Diego iHub.

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Bay Area Biomedical Device Conference – March 28 at San Jose State University

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Not all biomedical organizations include medical devices in their “definition of biotechnology,” but CSUPERB does because of the device industry’s significant presence in California and the growing biomedical engineering community across the CSU.   The 2012 California Biomedical Industry report includes data showing that 40.2% of the biomedical employees in the state work in the medical device, instruments and diagnostics sector. This year that makes it the largest biomedical employment sector in the state, beating out pharmaceuticals and academic research.

To raise the profile of biomedical device research and development in northern California, Guna Selvaduray and his Biomedical Engineering Society colleagues at the College of Engineering at San José State University (SJSU) are organizing another Biomedical Device Conference!

The one-day conference (Wednesday, March 28) on the SJSU campus features talks covering the R&D gamut – from biomaterials design to strategies for successful medical device clinical trials. The academic- and industry-based speakers represent a formidable set of biodevice experts from Silicon Valley and beyond.

Because Dr. Selvaduray is an active, faithful member of the CSUPERB FCG* , he’s offering $75 registrations to CSU faculty (a 50% discount!) as long as you register at the conference website before March 15. Fill out the registration form completely and in the Comments box at the bottom, type in “CSUPERB Faculty”, and click on the Submit button.  The site will automatically take you to the payment site but do not pay – the organizers will contact you to complete registration!

This is a great opportunity for engineers, chemists, entrepreneurs and biologists to spend a day learning about unmet medical needs, medical device design and product development.  Check out the program, spread the word and plan to attend!

*…and CSUPERB is helping to support the event!

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