RCN-UBE Incubator: KBase Educators: Microbiome Workforce Development Program

Undergraduate educators strive to incorporate useful and meaningful skills that engage their students in current research and prepare their students for jobs in science. However, access to resources that support training in microbiome research limit the ability of many institutions to effectively teach these skills. The KBase Educators: Program for Microbiome Workforce Development Research Coordination Network (RCN) Incubator is focused on developing a more inclusive and accessible microbiome research curriculum that enables a diversity of institutions to train students with the skills necessary to successfully enter the workforce. In addition to teaching resources, the RCN will bring together a peer support network that reaches across five types of institutions, with the goal of forming equitable partnerships that allows each educator to contribute meaningfully to develop a comprehensive microbiome research-based curriculum that accurately reflects realistic access to resources and standards. Participating educators will form working groups to develop a modular curriculum with the guiding question of how microbiomes respond to climate change across ecosystems and potential impacts for humans that culminates in student-led data publications. The RCN will support a workshop where educators can co-create and trial-run modules with their peers, and receive training from partner organizations, such as the Agricultural Microbiome RCN, National Ecological Observatory Network, and National Microbiome Data Collaborative. This will prepare them to pilot the modules in their classrooms, across a range of institutions, and to collect feedback and outline recommendations to scale the program in subsequent years. The goal of training an inclusive workforce is to enable students to become the next generation of researchers capable of answering current questions and generating open data that will address the grand challenges of our future. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for STEM Education, 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/). 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.