Staffers help link natural, computer sciences in Costa Rican class
Technology may help unlock some of nature's greatest mysteries. In the depths of the Costa Rican rainforest, two KU instructors shared that message with graduate students and faculty from around the western hemisphere while encouraging new research collaboration.
James Beach, assistant director for informatics at the Biodiversity Institute, and Aimee Stewart, senior software developer, helped lead a two-week National Science Foundation-funded bioinformatics course earlier this summer. The course, a Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute, brought together some of the most promising minds in the United States and Latin America.
"It was an intense, exhilarating course, and in the end we were all exhausted, but it was a tremendous learning experience," Beach said. "The whole idea was to encourage international collaboration."
Thirty young faculty and graduate students in various fields of science and informatics earned entry into the course through a competitive enrollment procedure.
Beach and Stewart co-organized the course with faculty from Florida International University. They weren't the only experts there. Utilizing a wireless network at the field station, instructors located at numerous points around the world were able to make presentations to participants.
Taking advantage of the natural classroom that surrounded them, participants gathered information from the rainforest. They then discussed new ways of cataloging, analyzing and storing the information with the technological specialists in the group.
Before the course's conclusion, participants were required to present ideas for new cross-disciplinary research projects.
"The course created a lot of awareness and cross talk between the participants," Beach said. "We had a lot of very imaginative students who came up with some outstanding ideas for future research."
While new ideas were born, so were new collaborations.
"It was incredibly valuable to learn more about the array of biodiversity informatics projects represented by this international group of Latin American and U.S. scientists and to begin to see the huge potential of interactions among data sets, institutions and researchers. The importance of new contacts and friendships cannot be underestimated," wrote one participant in a course evaluation.
Email Page
Print Page