Adapting Research Training During COVID-19
Adaptation to change is a defining characteristic of life, being essential for survival. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought on seismic change, compelling us all to think creatively about how we are going to adapt. But this process, and indeed any crisis, offers new opportunities for growth and improvement. Our Summer 2020 newsletter explores how the Maine INBRE is adapting to the COVID-19 crisis, with a focus on how our summer undergraduate research fellowship program has been restructured to provide remote mentored research and research training.
Bioinformatics and computational biology are an essential, unifying platform supporting the Maine INBRE scientific theme of Comparative Functional Genomics. Contemporary biomedical research is increasingly defined by an explosion of data (“Big Data”) enabled by high throughput “-omics” approaches. This explosion has enabled many biomedical problems to be addressed and research questions answered using existing datasets. A major barrier to such research is the knowledge and computational skill needed to interrogate databases, which many experimental biologists lack. Our Bioinformatics Core has responded to COVID-19 by ramping up its efforts in developing online resources to meet that need and facilitate remote research experiences and training.
Although Maine INBRE was not able to retool all its planned summer undergraduate research fellowships into remote research experiences, we were able to do so for many, through the combined efforts of Bioinformatics Core and Research Training and Resources Core staff as well as computationally savvy faculty mentors at several Maine INBRE partner institutions. This newsletter features stories of some of those investigators and their students. At the end of the summer we will evaluate these efforts to identify what worked and what didn’t and use the former to refine and improve our program for online mentored research experiences. A positive outcome of this will be for remote mentoring in bioinformatics and computational biology to become a new mechanism for expanding opportunities for engagement in cutting edge biomedical research, training and employment.
Read the full story from Maine INBRE here.