Amanda Simcox
$74,781
Zhongqi Cheng
Alam A Nur-E-Kamal
Jennifer Basil
Diana Samaroo
CUNY Brooklyn College
New York
Biological Sciences (BIO)
Students in STEM majors nationwide frequently fail to translate course learning experiences into career aspirations. Course content often lacks connections to societal issues or fail to address public problems using skills students developed in their majors. The STEM Career Exploration Laboratory Network (STEMCEL) is designed to develop and implement a “course to community and career skillset” approach to enhance students’ civic engagement and encourage them to explore a variety of STEM careers that can bring socioeconomic advancement.<br/><br/>The Network will build a bridge between community problems and educational institutions by having students apply their classroom curricula to develop solutions to societal and social justice needs. An example is development of rapid environmental testing tools that contribute to identifying and monitoring contaminated local sites. The overarching goals of the STEMCEL incubator are to: connect biology students to civic-engagement by identifying communal needs, develop a multimodal approach to the problem through hands-on research exploration in early laboratory courses that will train students in state-of-the art techniques, participate in building a network with peers and experts in the fields of STEM careers, and advance scientific critical thinking to provide practical solutions to real-life problems with deliverables. This work will establish and improve connections that will result in positive environmental impact in local regions, by developing a rapid contaminant detection test. STEMCEL partners from 2-year community colleges, 4-year colleges, research institutes, industrial liaisons as well as New York city civil offices, will work together to enrich the students’ research and networking experiences in the curricula and in real-life implementation processes. The STEMCEL network will bring career exploration into early undergraduate curricula to expand students’ view of other rewarding and important career paths outside of the healthcare-related fields that they are familiar with when they enter college. The project will be scalable nationwide, as environmental contaminants are a major issue for the whole country. The STEMCEL philosophy is to create courses incorporating authentic research that contribute to large data sets nationwide while educating our students to the variety of STEM careers available. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).<br/><br/>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.