BUILD Virtual Summer Research Experience.
The NIH funded Building Infrastructures Leading to Diversity (BUILD) awardees are looking to partner with the NRMN community. “BUILD awards consist of linked grants issued to undergraduate institutions to implement and study innovative approaches to engaging and retaining students from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research, potentially helping them on the pathway to become future contributors to the NIH-funded research enterprise.” (https://www.nigms.nih.gov/training/dpc/pages/build.aspx)
Due to the current pandemic and the closures of research laboratories to the NIH BUILD trainees, several of the BUILD program sites have collaborated to develop a summer research alliance. This summer the alliance will be comprised of five of the ten BUILD sites and will offer two research options for the participating trainees. In an effort to assist with the small group nature of the research options, we would like to involve more researchers in our effort. Please review the research options below and inform us of your interest.
Option 1: Scholarly Writing Groups
This option will offer trainees the opportunity to work in faculty/researcher-led small writing groups. The groups will include trainees from the participating BUILD sites who have either a shared research interest or discipline. If the faculty/researcher has an interest in COVID-19 data, there is an opportunity for interested faculty to collaborate with the BRC (Option 2) of the alliance. The writing groups will use pre-existing data from faculty/researchers who plan on leading the writing groups. Trainees will have additional oversight provided by their respective BUILD sites. In addition, trainees will be enrolled in a Coursera writing course (https://www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite) to help facilitate their learning.
Option 2: BUILD Research Collaboratory (BRC)
This option will offer trainees the opportunity to work with faculty mentors whose research goals and interest include the intersection of community driven/based research and translating research outcomes into practical implications and practice. The BRC will combine a pool of pre-existing projects that students can select from and students will decide based on personal interest and access to available data from our UCSF partners. We are working now to identify the COVID related projects that have recently been funded. The BRC would like partner with faculty mentors who would like to utilize the R coding to analyze and translate the big data into information that is community accessible. (https://sfbuild.sfsu.edu/content/build-research-collaboratory-brc)
Program timeline: 8 weeks-June 22nd-August 15th, 2020 Students have the option to continue in groups beyond the required timeline. If you have any questions or are interested in volunteering as a mentor for either of these options, please contact Jennifer Tabb at jtabb@wayne.edu.
