Over the next 8 weeks, my research team (Ethan Hobbs, Philip Benson, and I) will be delving into the details of the global pollinator decline. We are starting with almost no knowledge of this problem and within 2 months, we will have to offer up our own solution to the Grand Challenge, "reduce the rate of pollinator decline by 50% by the 2025". As we move through this project, I aim to provide an update each week on our progress. I am hoping that by providing some details about the process of scientific research, that you will have a better sense for how scientists arrive at the decisions they make (this part is often the only visible part). This is also a new process for me because it is my first opportunity to do policy-style science. What I mean by this is that we will not be engaging in lab-bench science to answer the Grand Challenge question. Instead, we will be relying on the decades of work done by many other scientists, collating that information, synthesizing it into the context of our Grand Challenge, and then providing a "solution". Last, week we were given our problem and we all met with our advisor (Dr. Colin Campbell) to discuss the approach. After the first month, we will be presenting to the others about the problem ONLY. "The problem" includes all the technical details about the threats pollinators face AND the context of the problem like the global significance or the social and economic impacts. Once our advisor focused our energy on discovering what the PROBLEM was about, we went into the IQ office and drew on the board. We outlined all the things that we would like to know about pollinators including their global distribution, the rate of decline per type of pollinator, the human impacts of pollinator decline, and much more. In my mind, there are two really good starting points for learning about something you know nothing about. The first, is to find a local expert who thinks about the topic a lot. For us, this is Tom Theobald, who is the founder of the Boulder County Beekeepers' Association. He has a fantastic blog that you can find here. Tom is a local advocate for pollinator health and potentially a great source of local knowledge on this topic.
The second approach, is to start at the global scale. I was encouraged by my professor Nichole Barger to take a look at the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services' (IPBES) Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination, and Food Production (link here). This is a United Nation's report that policy-makers would consult before making decisions about agriculture, pesticide use, and pollinators. Now that we have some background knowledge of the topic, we will meet with our advisor tomorrow to outline which research areas we need to delve into in more depth to actually address the Grand Challenge question. I suppose we may also reach out to local resources, like Tom Theobald, for some in-person meetings and discussion
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March 9, 2019
This week the IQ Biology students had Innovation and Skills Training with Kevin Parker from KKi Associates (http://www.kkitech.com/index.php). According to his website, this is the “UK’s longest established provider of training in commercial and financial skills for scientists and technologists”. Kevin spent the whole day teaching us about science communication and financial skills. His wife, who works in finance and has a degree in chemistry, was his assistant and helped to calculate the stock market prices in our game where we were given $50,000 to invest in different start-up businesses. Kevin spent his early career as a lubricants specialist with BP and then left the industry. At one point during the oil spill in the Gulf, he was asked by a journalist to assess the spill relative to sunken oil tankers in the same area during WWII. He found that they were roughly equivalent. Kevin trains students and professionals in entrepreneurship, something which is common for BioFrontiers faculty and students to tack on to their academic careers. We also had our final rotation talks this week. They went well, and we greatly appreciated the second-year students attending and supporting us. The talks felt less serious this time because we all knew what to expect, but I do think the discussions and questions afterward were more intense and exciting than they have been in the past. I think this is a good sign that we are gaining confidence in ourselves and research generally. As we move into the second half of this semester, we begin the team rotations. We were all assigned a group and a mentor who presented us with our team science topics. The topics are: 1) Are cancer cells immortal and if so, what does this imply? 2) Reduce the rate of decline of pollinators by 50% by 2025. The third project involves working at the children’s hospital and thinking about negative test results in cancer detection. All of the topics are complex and exciting. I am very excited to get started on my pollinator topic because this is an issue I have heard about for a long time but have never taken the time to think about in depth. We have the first month of the project to define the problem and to really delve into the scientific, economic, and social dimensions of the problem. We were encouraged to consider if 2025 is too late for the pollinators. We were also encouraged to think globally since problems and solutions in America are going to look very different from problems and solutions anywhere else. We are also starting on group projects in Dr. Peleg's class, Biologically-inspired multi-agent systems. This has been a reading and discussion type course so far where we think about biological systems and how they might inspire technological design, like robotics. Now, we are working on our own projects which will include making our own models to answer questions. I have been thinking about asking, how can external influences (like Russia) actually change American public opinion to influence elections. This should be a fun question to tackle. Of course, moving on from our third rotations is bitter sweet. I’d like to thank the Larremore and Clauset labs for adopting me for 8-weeks and showing me what they are able to do with computer science. I really enjoyed my time with all of these people who taught me, most importantly, that computer scientists are the best at explaining things because they are so logical and clear and concise in their language. I aim to be more like you all in this way. |
AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
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