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Broader Impacts Success Stories
Highlighting exciting, innovative broader impacts activities at Duke.The Duke research community is engaged in exciting, impactful, innovative broader impacts activities. This page highlights a few of these. If you or your colleagues are doing interesting broader impacts activities, contact us and let us know, and we might profile your work here.
Mohamed Noor, Ph.D.
Earl D. McLean Professor and Chair of Biology
noor@duke.edu
Tell us about a Broader Impacts Success:
I developed an activity wherein students set up crosses with fruit flies and observe spread of an “advantageous mutation” over generations. I then developed an additional piece to look for “selective sweeps” where students do PCR of markers near vs. far from the advantageous mutation and see absence of variation near but retained variation far. Concepts covered: natural selection, X-chromosome linkage, selective sweeps. The project was developed in partnership with NSF RET-supported teacher at local public high school, who presented it at state science teacher workshop and was coauthor on resultant publications (in American Biology Teacher and Evolution Education & Outreach).
Who was the primary target audience for this activity?
High school students and early-stage college students. A short version has also employed been in middle school.
What specific outcome/outcomes of this activity were most exciting and impactful for your target audience? For you?
Working with students in a public high school (as compared with elite private or science-focused schools which already have extensive resources) was a pleasure—the students really enjoyed doing hands-on activities and came away with stronger understanding and appreciation that evolution by natural selection is neither controversial nor difficult. The molecular evolution piece was successful for introductory college students in illustrating the concepts of selective sweeps and hitchhiking. The teacher with whom we worked is PHENOMENAL, and we continue to benefit from her insights in other projects. Finally, we partnered with Carolina Biological Supply to make a “kit” to allow teachers to get everything teachers need to run this activity themselves: http://www.carolina.com/drosophila-fruit-fly-genetics/natural-selection-with-drosophila-kit/FAM_171995.pr
Broader Impacts News & Events
2019 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Application Information
The 2019 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Applications are due the end of October! Click the link above to view application requirements and applicant criteria.
NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences changes core program solicitations
Effective beginning January 2018, the NSF BIO directorate is implementing a “no-deadline”, full proposal mechanism for receiving and reviewing proposals. This change is being made in an effort to encourage interdisciplinary research across divisional boundaries. There will no longer be calls for preliminary proposals or deadlines for submissions to any of the new solicitations.
NABI Summit 2018: Call for proposals now open!
The National Alliance for Broader Impacts has issued a call for abstracts for the 2018 summit in Providence, RI. Submission will be open until January 9, 2018. More information regarding submissions and the Summit can be found here.
Contact the BIRC
Jory Weintraub, PhD
BIRC Director
jory@duke.edu
919.668.0792
North Building 236
Box 90222
Durham, NC 27708