Emily joined the lab in early 2020 to work on a project investigating calf health and gut microbes, but very soon after joining the lab, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic emerged and changed the way we were able to interact on campus. Without missing a beat, Emily shifted her efforts from helping me wrangle the lab renovations and sorting out our inventory, to helping me improve my teaching materials, to diving deep into previous literature to dig up protocols for her experiment in 2021: “Ideal Conditions for Cryptosporidium Attachment and Infection.“
We’ll be performing the experiment itself over the winter break, and then using the spring to analyze the data and write them up. As part of the CUGR award, Emily will be presenting her work at the 2021 Student Symposium in April, which will be held virtually this year. You’ll have to wait till then to get more details!
With the closing of the fall semester, I said goodbye to the students in my AVS 254: Introduction to Animal Microbiomes class. Despite the challenges and turmoil of fall 2020, these students have been engaged, enthusiastic, and creative. After presenting lectures on the microbial communities in and on animal hosts and how they can impact health and fitness, for the final class of the semester, I wanted to close with perspectives from the broader world of science.
To that end, I compiled several videos of “science journeys”, as told by active researchers in host microbiology, with an introduction to the class/video and my own science journey. I hope to compile a new volume each year I teach the class, to gather diverse paths.
I am extremely grateful for the time, effort, and thoughtfulness of the researchers who were able to contribute during a hectic semester to volume one:
Edna Chiang, University of Wisconsin Madison, @EdnaChiang
Dr. Kaitlin Flynn, Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle, @microkaitlin
Kiran Gurung, University of Groningen, @kirangurung29
Jocelyn R. Holt, Texas A&M University, @JocelynRHolt
Chissa Rivaldi, University of Notre Dame, @Powerofcheez
Dr. Laura Tipton, Chaminade University of Honolulu, @lauraomics
Dr. Benjamin Wenner, The Ohio State University, @Bynjammin
Mice have arrived for a collaborative project on diet, gut microbes, and health in conjunction with researchers at Husson University! This is the first mouse project for the Ishaq Lab, and also my first hands-on mouse project (in my previous publications with mice, I received datasets but the mouse work was performed solely by my collaborators).
This is one of my first new collaborations at the University of Maine, which began in September 2019 as I was just finding my way around campus. An established researcher at Husson University, Dr. Yanyan Li, reached out to welcome me and talk about overlap between our work. Yanyan, her husband Dr. Tao Zhang, also a researcher at Husson University, and collaborator Dr. Grace Chen at Michigan State University, had been working on beneficial compounds found in broccoli using mice as an experimental model for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Over the past year, in consultation with IBD experts Drs. Gary Mawe and Peter Moses (who I worked with previously while at UVM!), we have written several proposals for funding to expand the project.
Johanna Holman worked for several years with Yanyan and Tao, as an undergraduate researcher and then as a research assistant. She joined the Ishaq Lab this fall to continue her work as a graduate student and add gut microbiology to her skill repertoire. This experiment will form the base of her graduate thesis, and Johanna is taking a lead role in managing the project as well as several undergraduate researchers, including Dorien Baudewyns, assisting with the mice and lab work. As an early career researcher, and new to mice, I’m extremely lucky to be able to learn from an experienced team of researchers!
2020 has been an interesting year for scientific conferences and meetings, which typically bring dozens to thousands of researchers and professionals together to share their work. Some of the bigger meetings, or those occurring early on in the pandemic, elected to cancel their events because there was no time to adjust the logistics for hosting a massive meeting online.
As the year progressed with no sign of the pandemic abating, more conferences opted for a modified event online. This included live-stream and/or recorded content, spacing the event over a longer period to reduce “zoom fatigue”, and making network events smaller virtual versions. It certainly would have been more rewarding to be able to have these in person, but I am pleased that conference organizers chose safety as their priority.
In some ways, having virtual content made the material more accessible. recordings meant you could watch content at your convenience, more organizations provided or required subtitles for presentations, and those who would otherwise not be able to attend, because of cost, childcare, or travel constraints, were able to participate.
The Ishaq Lab presentations for 2020 is below, with presenters denoted with an asterisk (*).
Ishaq*, S.L.”Framing the discussion of microorganisms as a facet of social equity in human health”, inVIVO Planetary Health 2020 meeting. (revised to virtual) Amsterdam, Netherlands. Dec 2020.
Yeoman*, C., Lachman, M., Ishaq, S., Olivo, S., Swartz, J., Herrygers, M., Berarddinelli, J. “Development of Climactic Oral and Rectal Microbiomes Corresponds to Peak Immunoglobin Titers in Lambs.” Conference of Research Workers in Animal Diseases (CRWAD) 2020. (revised to virtual) Dec 5, 2020.
Ishaq*, S.L., Hotopp, A., Silverbrand, S., MacRae, J., Stock, S.P., Groden, E. “Can a necromenic nematode serve as a biological Trojan horse for an invasive ant?” Entomological Society of America 2020. (revised to virtual). Nov 15-25, 2020.
Menalled*, F.D., Seipel, T., Ishaq, S.L. “Agroecosystem resilience is modified by management system via plant–soil feedbacks.” Ecological Society of America (ESA) 2020. (revised to virtual) Salt Lake City, UT. Aug 2020.
[meeting cancelled] Horve*, P.F., Dietz, L., Ishaq, S.L., Fretz, M., Van Den Wymelenberg, K. “Characterization of Viable Microbial Communities on Healthcare Associated Window Components.” American Society for Microbiology Microbe 2020, Chicago, IL. Jun 2020.
[meeting cancelled] Horve*, P.F., Dietz, L., Ishaq, S.L., Fretz, M., Van Den Wymelenberg, K. “Characterization of Viable Microbial Communities on Healthcare Associated Window Components.” 2020 Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) Gordon Research Conference, Andover, NH. Jun 2020.
Zeng*, H., Safratowich, B.D., Liu, Z., Bukowski, M.R., Ishaq, S.L. “Supplementation of calcium and vitamin D reduces colonic inflammation and beta-catenin signaling in C57BL/6 mice fed a western diet.” American Society for Nutrition 2020. (revised to virtual) Seattle, WA. June 2020.
Starting this fall, I have been teaching the UMaine Capstone Experience courses for Animal and Veterinary Sciences students (AVS 401 and 402). To complete the University of Maine requirements for graduation, students must participate in a Capstone Experience to knit together the work of their undergraduate degree into a cohesive project. AVS students are required to part pate in research under researcher mentorship. Some of those students felt comfortable sharing short descriptions of their project. The slightly edited summaries and my intro were posted to the University of Maine news page for teaching experience updates.
Last Friday, I gave a seminar on “A crash course in the gut microbiome” to the University of Maine Institute of Medicine as part of their fall seminar series. You can find the previous seminars in that series here.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to share my science to researchers around Maine, and to have so many engaging questions!
You can find my seminar recording here, and a pdf of the slides with my presenter notes as annotated comments can be found here:
This is the final installment of the selected portions of my Teaching Statement as part of a development series, drafted as I refine my philosophies for the submission of my second-year review this fall. I welcome feedback! Feel free to comment on the post (note, all comments require my approval before appearing publicly on the site), or contact me directly if you have more substantial edits.
*Please note, these are selected portions of my Statement which have been edited to remove sensitive information. These are early drafts, and may not reflect my final version. Tenure materials that I generate are mine to share, but my department chair, committee, and union representative were consulted prior to posting these. Each tenure-granting institution is unique, and departments weigh criteria differently, thus Statements can’t really be directly compared between faculty.*
Evaluating my approach to teaching (modified to remove sensitive information)
I regularly solicit student feedback in my courses, either in class, or via anonymous surveys using online teaching platforms (Brightspace), to improve the quality and content of my teaching materials. For example, a voluntary, anonymous survey of AVS 401 Senior Paper in Animal Science I students in fall 2020 on lecture content and order revealed that the material presented (see Developing curricula) was all or partly new to them, that they would have preferred to learn about Project Management and Experimental Design earlier in the lecture series, and that they found all lectures to contain useful information. Survey report available upon request. Student comments included
[ Student comments redacted for the blog post]
Similarly, I solicit feedback from my peers, including an ad hoc Pedagogy in STEMM working group on campus. The working group meets semi-weekly to discuss curriculum development, and in particular, including social issues into science courses. I led a one-hour meeting on re-thinking tense classroom conversations, as well as making student contribution equitable and productive. My re-devised strategy, a result of that working-group meeting, for discussion topics which do not elicit student engagement is to ignore the topic discussion and jump to resolution planning in the short and long-term using starting scenarios which include cost/benefit analyses, if applicable.
Finally, the use of online teaching software (Brightspace) allows me to evaluate student engagement in real-time, from tracking assignment submission times, to identifying patterns in grading that point to poorly-worded or confusing assignments, to participation in online discussion forums by topic. The software facilitates tracking progress by individual students or the class over time, allowing me to parse when I need to reach out to offer additional help, or when I need to change an assignment deadline because it conflicts with large assignments (such as mid-term exams) from other courses which divert student attention.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing selected portions of my Teaching Statement here as part of a development series, as I refine my philosophies for the submission of my second-year review this fall. I welcome feedback! Feel free to comment on the post (note, all comments require my approval before appearing publicly on the site), or contact me directly if you have more substantial edits.
*Please note, these are selected portions of my Statement which have been edited to remove sensitive information. These are early drafts, and may not reflect my final version. Tenure materials that I generate are mine to share, but my department chair, committee, and union representative were consulted prior to posting these. Each tenure-granting institution is unique, and departments weigh criteria differently, thus Statements can’t really be directly compared between faculty.*
Tying science course content to other aspects of society
I have two goals in my attempt to connect my science curricula to other aspects of society: to provide a broader educational perspective on science, and to stimulate imagination regarding the application of scientific knowledge to community building and civic engagement. Students need to understand that science is ongoing, and that there are yet many questions in the field for them to answer.
One technique to connect science and society in my coursework is to encourage students to self-identify as scientists, and to understand that they are able to participate in it. For example, on the first day of AVS 401 (Capstone), the students made a word-cloud of adjectives to describe their idea of a scientist, shown below. At the end of the academic year, after participating in research and learning about the process, students will make another collaborative world-cloud. As a class, students will reflect on whether their understanding of science and scientists has changed, and whether they are more (or less) likely to perceive science as a field that they are able to engage with. Hopefully, this participation in research and reflective exercise will accentuate their use of effort-based descriptors, such as “patient” or “methodical”, rather than ability-based descriptors, such as “gifted”, when thinking about scientists, and thereby when thinking about themselves. It is important for students to learn that science is a process to participate in, not a gift that you are born with. In fact, a large-scale research study found that student achievement gaps were more dramatically narrowed when the instructor held the personal view that ability could be taught, rather than ability was fixed, i.e. you are born with it (Canning et al. 2019, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau4734).
Word-cloud of adjectives to describe a scientist, AVS 401, Sept 1, 2020.
Another technique is to highlight the importance of the principles of research (i.e. finding and testing information for accuracy) and how those principles can be integrated into daily life or future careers, regardless of what those are. This includes teaching the AVS 401 students about why we need research, for example, in order to be more objective and remove our personal biases. I explain how search engines work, and how the design of algorithms can contribute to the popularity of search results outweighing the quality and correctness of the information. I talk about the importance of unbiased data in training sets, highlighting examples of artificial intelligence programs which were trained on social media interactions espousing violent rhetoric because human users thought it was fun to tell the AI that all humans held such views.
In addition to providing information about the process of research and how to design an experiment, I give AVS 401 students information on the administrative aspects of research, including personnel and project management. For example, I teach students about how researchers find funding and the goals of writing research proposals, and highlight the importance of including descriptions of project management in research proposals to prove you have the capacity to perform the experiment I also give examples of demonstrated implicit bias in proposal reviewing that creates inequality in funding availability to different demographics of scientists, and how this artificially makes them look less competent when it comes time for internal review. While this may seem immaterial to the class, reminding students that science cannot be divorced from the views of society, and that in order to overcome our bias as scientists we need to overcome our bias as people, too.
Thus, I provide background information of science and society to my classes, where pertinent. For AVS 254, Introduction to Animal Microbiomes, the first section of the course (8 lectures) are devoted to the development of microbial ecology theory and technology over time, from the discovery of “wee animalcules” to the use of metagenomics. During these lectures, I provide annotations on historic scientists who have been lauded for their work, but who used that science for discrimination. For example, James Watson, one of the researchers credited with determining the structure of DNA and the process of replication, was famously racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic, to the point where some of his awards were later revoked by institutions. In one of his biographies, he devoted an entire paragraph to denigrating the appearance of Rosalind Franklin, whose originally-uncredited work was integral to Watson’s own success (https://www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18182530/james-watson-racist). By telling this story in lecture, and following up with a discussion on “Elitism and Credit for Intellectual Contribution”, I place what is clearly a monumental scientific discovery in the context of society and human interactions. It is critically important for students to understand that the journal articles they read about animal microbes in the rest of the class is the result of hundreds of years of effort and thousands of contributors, because it starts a discussion about power dynamics in science and in workplaces, in general. It is important for them to understand how implicit bias, stereotypes, elitism, or even poor interpersonal relationships can affect science, as well as for them to learn that they have rights to their intellectual property and that they can actively make their future workplaces more equitable such that we do not continue to make the mistakes of the past.
Another technique is getting students to appreciate the hundreds of years-and-counting worth of history which led us to our current understanding of the microbes that interact with us. Without that history, and a discussion of how that technological journey shaped our current scientific understanding, I cannot do justice to the majority of the coursework. By and large, DNA sequencing is the technology behind much of the subject material in my AVS 254, Intro to Animal Microbiomes class. Sequencing is often portrayed as a panacea for all scientific questions, yet I teach students that as this technology improved we realized our experimental procedures were biased. Being able to see this change over time requires perspective and time spent in a field, something that most undergraduates do not yet possess for microbial ecology. And without the historical perspective, how can we understand that the most prevalent DNA sequencing technology today owes its success, in partm to the acquisition of a patent the company bought in a ‘fire sale’ because no one wanted to buy the patent outright from an African American with no higher education degree. In science courses, we only have so much time to disseminate information, and for that reason we often skip to the results, the end point, the cutting edge. Yet in telling only one story, or only the ending of the story, we rob students of the opportunity to see that science is a living process over time. To see that scientists may be fallible, or that technology has both limited and informed our understanding of the natural world, or to understand why “some scientists” may disagree about the effects or scope of climate change. Students need to understand that science is ongoing, and that just because knowledge is not fixed does not mean that is unreliable.
Towards the second goal, I use assignments and in-class discussions to stimulate imagination towards applying scientific knowledge to life outside of the classroom for the purpose of community building and active citizenship. In fact, the AVS 254 discussion on “Elitism and Credit for Intellectual Contribution” is a great example. Students engage with this topic because it is a situation that they can identify with. An in-class discussion on “Are your microbes really yours?” similarly stimulates student engagement. I think this topic succeeds because it is anovel concept and it sparks curiosity, and because it is a neutral topic in that there is no wrong stance, and asking questions about the topic is not associated with a moral judgement.
However, not all topic discussions are successful with all student groups. For example, “Do we have a right to tell people how to conduct agricultural practices?”, after a lecture about agricultural practices which affect gut microbes and may trigger disease in livestock This topic is one that I had devised at the University of Oregon for non-science-majors, who were interested in human connection to animal-microbe interactions. Asking them questions which deliberately set up a pro/con side appealed to them because they were used to being asked to debate stances they did not espouse and they found it an interesting thought experiment. However, at UMaine, teaching to animal- and life science students, the same question failed to engage them because the topics were not hypothetical as they had direct experience in it and they had already formed conclusions about the topic. UMaine students also felt that the phrasing of this question was insensitive, which had been my point – I wanted them to practice arguing a stance for agricultural sustainability in the face of opposition. Because UMaine students had already come to the same conclusion about this topic – that agricultural sustainability was important and could be used to improve economic security of food systems, they felt there was no question for them to answer.
As my first semester teaching AVS 254 has been fall 2020, in a remote format during a pandemic, the conversational interaction that I typically have with my students is lacking, which is usually the basis for how I develop the topic and phrasing of discussions. Instead, to improve my curricula and my strategy for using discussions to improve student critical thinking skills over the course of the semester, I workshopped my approach to discussions in an ad hoc Pedagogy in STEM working group on campus. The working group meets semi-weekly to discuss curriculum development, and in particular, weaving social issues into science courses. I led a one-hour meeting on re-thinking tense classroom conversations, as well as making student contributions equitable and productive during discussions. My re-devised strategy (a direct result of that working-group meeting) for discussion topics which do not elicit student engagement is to ignore the topic discussion and jump to resolution planning in the short and long-term using starting scenarios which include cost/benefit analyses, if applicable. Instead of “Do we have a right to tell people how to conduct agricultural practices?”, the set-up will be “How do we plan for more sustainable ruminant agriculture?” Students will be given a scenario of a farmer in Florida that wants to switch their cattle herd to a heat tolerate breed. A brief economic analysis will be provided, such as cost to buy new cattle, as well as management concerns such as availability of markets to sell off current stock or sourcing new animals from less-common breeds. Students will then have to decide how they will “get there from here”: what will they do today? Tomorrow? In one year? In ten years? Changing industries and human societies is a slow path, and many people get discouraged by their lack of progress and move away from active citizenship. Having students plan out short and long-term goals for change will ideally help them to learn to apply knowledge to planning actions today, and in the future.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing selected portions of my Teaching Statement here as part of a development series, as I refine my philosophies for the submission of my second-year review this fall. I welcome feedback! Feel free to comment on the post (note, all comments require my approval before appearing publicly on the site), or contact me directly if you have more substantial edits.
*Please note, these are selected portions of my Statement which have been edited to remove sensitive information. These are early drafts, and may not reflect my final version. Tenure materials that I generate are mine to share, but my department chair, committee, and union representative were consulted prior to posting these. Each tenure-granting institution is unique, and departments weigh criteria differently, thus Statements can’t really be directly compared between faculty.*
Research mentorship (modified to remove sensitive information)
For students in my lab, who are listed in the Student Research Mentoring section, I approach mentorship the same way I do my in-class pedagogy, which is to say that I stress the importance of both technical skills and communication skills. A large portion of their time is spent developing laboratory skills, many of which are translatable to other fields and types of research. These skills include sample collection, DNA extraction, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), qualitative PCR (qPCR), DNA purification and quantification, gel electrophoresis, DNA sequencing library preparation, DNA sequence data analysis, microbial isolation from mixed communities, microbial culture under aerobic and anaerobic conditions, microbial biochemical testing and microbiology, microscopy, as well as some mammalian cell culture. In addition to learning these skills, students are responsible for performing related data analysis, developing or refining protocols, and learning to care for the equipment they are using. As for communication skills, students must read and translate information found in scientific articles, perform literature reviews, present their updates or results in lab meetings, write scientific protocols, generate and give scientific presentations, and write scientific manuscripts or other documents for dissemination.
However, I feel that learning to manage scientific research is also a critical skill for students, and all participate to some degree, including my undergraduate students. Students are asked to take the lead on contacting other faculty with questions, calling manufacturers for information on supplies and reagents, generating shopping lists for materials and comparing products, updating inventory, and sharing and curating information or data. Once students feel proficient in a particular skill, they are encouraged to teach it to another student. Likewise, multiple students are grouped together on projects, giving them a cohort of peers to trouble-shoot and discuss their research with. For projects involving culturing work, this also requires them to learn division of labor, time management, and coordination of research efforts in order to maintain the experiment and share equipment. For graduate students, these project management skills also include a small amount of personnel management, as they are designated as project team leaders and participate in coordinating undergraduate students in the lab.
I have been mentoring student researchers at the University of Maine since January 2020, beginning with undergraduates and a non-thesis graduate student, and adding two thesis-based graduate advisees as of fall 2020. I am currently a documented committee member for three graduate students, including two in the School of Food and Agriculture, and one at Montana State University in Land Resources and Environmental Sciences. For each of these students, I provide mentoring, training, and high-level perspective on microbiology lab work, including DNA extraction, PCR, qPCR, and sequencing library preparation, as well as DNA sequence data analysis. All three projects relate to my work on microbial communities in agriculture, or which would impact the gut. Several of these students are working on collaborative projects between myself and other researchers, including those on and off campus. In particular, students from other majors and departments bring their scientific skills to my microbiology and microbial genetics work, and increase the overall competency and skill set of my lab. These students support interdisciplinary work, and have contributed or will contribute to scientific publications and presentations as authors.
I strongly believe that students who contribute to research should have the option to contribute at an author level, if they choose, but many are unaware of their intellectual property and publication rights that the University supports. In my varied experiences in academia, I have been witness to research disputes on authorship which inevitably ended in the student researcher being negatively affected by the resolution of the dispute. In nearly all of these cases, guidelines on publication rights and expectations in the lab were not clearly outlined between the student and the advisor. Nor were there guidelines in place for resolving disputes via mediation from a true third party. In one of the labs I trained in, a Memorandum of Understanding was developed by the researcher to outline rights and responsibilities for new lab members, and over the years I adopted this document to be pertinent for my research situations. At the University of Maine, I heard a similar need for this type of document from students, and have been working with students, faculty, and administrative staff to revise an MOU for use on campus. At present, we are in the process of finalizing a clear first draft, after which we will invite campus members, such as those in the Graduate College, unions, tech-transfer office, and Student Life, to a focus group to discuss the document. It is my goal to have the Graduate College adopt a modifiable version of the MOU and encourage faculty to discuss it with new lab members.
[The rest has been removed for this post as it contains student information.]
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing selected portions of my Teaching Statement here as part of a development series, as I refine my philosophies for the submission of my second-year review this fall. I welcome feedback! Feel free to comment on the post (note, all comments require my approval before appearing publicly on the site), or contact me directly if you have more substantial edits.
*Please note, these are selected portions of my Statement which have been edited to remove sensitive information. These are early drafts, and may not reflect my final version. Tenure materials that I generate are mine to share, but my department chair, committee, and union representative were consulted prior to posting these. Each tenure-granting institution is unique, and departments weigh criteria differently, thus Statements can’t really be directly compared between faculty.*
Integrating research and teaching
AVS 454/554 DNA Sequencing Analysis Lab encourages students to bring their own microbial community data, or allows them to work on unpublished data donated by my research collaborators. By working with unpublished data, and connecting to active research projects, students have the opportunity to develop real-world skills in a lifelike research context. While I teach them how to perform statistics or create figures, as well as when they are contextually appropriate, the development of their research narrative and results presentation is somewhat-student led. They learn to explain their data, not only to me or to other students during peer-review, but to researchers who typically have expertise in fields other than microbial ecology. And, the use of unpublished data creates the possibility to pursue submission of their manuscripts, generated for class assignments, for scientific publication along with cooperating researchers, which engages students in research beyond the scope of the class.
There is a critical need in the research community for analysis of small projects like the ones used in this class; often these data are from low-priority small projects, or researchers simply do not have the time or expertise to train students in data analysis and interpretation. The special topics version (AVS 590) in spring 2020 was composed of 7 students, with 2 additional graduate students informally attending the class as they were graduating that semester. The work in class resulted in 3 scientific manuscripts submitted for review in fall 2020, all with student authors and some with student first-authors. In particular, the extended interactions of students through internal and external review offers them an opportunity for guidance through what can be a challenging process for new researchers. For the spring 2020 class, I was presented with two unpublished datasets from collaborators at UMaine and across the US, and I view this class as an opportunity to assist UMaine students in networking to improve their career trajectory. I anticipate more enrolled students, and more collaborative projects, in future offerings of this course.
Beginning in the 2020/2021 academic year, I began teaching AVS 401 (fall) and 402 ( spring), Senior Paper in Animal Science I and II, respectively. Together, they form the Capstone Experience for AVS seniors. The scope of this class was and remains student involvement in a research project, for which students develop a research proposal in written and oral presentation formats, and then develop a research report in written and oral presentation formats. Animal and Veterinary Science is heavily focused on professional development for animal science, production, and veterinary careers, which most accurately serves the interest of the majority of our students. The final component of their education with us is to learn to apply that knowledge in an informational-seeking capacity, i.e. research. Most students in the department and on campus, in general, have no prior experience participating in research. Or, their participation extends to sample collection and processing, and data analysis. It is difficult to incorporate the aspects of experimental design conceptualization and project management, despite being critical aspects of scientific research and development. Thus, in fall 2020 I began with an academic approach to applying these aspects of research in education, through the use of lectures. Feedback from students early on in the fall semester indicated that many of the concepts I included in my lectures (see Developing curricula section) were almost or completely new to them.
To provide a more comprehensive experience in conceptualizing research questions and developing plans to test them, I required students to include other components in their research proposals in addition to the background information, hypothesis, objectives/aims, and experimental design or project description. These additional components include a project timeline, a list of project personnel and their responsibilities or contributions, a statement on data management and sharing, and a statement on information dissemination and sharing, with specific outcomes or outputs listed (if applicable). The infection-preventative measures enacted to contain the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has shifted the amount and type of research on campus, and the way that students are able to engage in active research. Thus, for fall 2020 I did not require students to consider some aspects while writing their research proposal in the fall for AVS 401, such as budgets and justification, whether they had available equipment, and a description of their available facilities, but these will likely become small written components in future years. For the research proposal, I do not consider any of the materials that students generate to be binding, as projects evolve during their course and many student projects are redirected by advisors, and I clarified this point to students. As long as a research proposal was well-thought out, it could be materially different from the research report they generate by the end of the spring semester.
The Ishaq Lab 