MSB Mammal Division

MSB Home

Featured Student Activities

General Info

MSB Policy

News & Events

Support Us

Publication Series and Annual Reports

EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

Worldwide, comparatively few training programs in environmental, evolutionary, and biomedical sciences are centered at university museums. Consequently, MSB plays a primary role in using collections-based experiences to train the next generation of investigators in these areas. UNM is a “Minority Serving Institution” and MSB is attracting top high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from diverse ethnic backgrounds to work on collections-based projects.

Graduate Students: A large proportion of the projects supported by MSB specimens are dissertation questions, ca.15 current or recently completed dissertations at UNM and a minimum of 30 dissertations at other institutions (e.g., Texas Tech, UCLA; Oregon State Univ.; Univ. Minnesota) are currently using MSB specimens.

Undergraduate Students: Students on NSF-REUs and in UMEB have participated in field, lab, or museum projects throughout the West and in Latin America. Our specimens support promising undergraduate projects and several recent honors theses have been based in the museum. The collection also serves as lab material in courses such as General Biology, Vertebrate Zoology, Molecular Evolution, and Mammalogy.

High School Students: Minority high school students also worked with support from NSF's program "Research Assistantships for Minority High School Students." Other programs such as "Resource Apprenticeships for Students" (Bureau of Land Management, 9 high school students over 4 years) and federal work-study funds (24 students since 1993) have provided training to many budding scientists. Indeed, many of today's best scientists and scholars began their careers associated with museums and a large number of MSB affiliated students are now professional scientists.

Undergraduate Activities:

Undergraduate Opportunities (UnO) in research at the University of New Mexico has a goal in this 5-year program to recruit and prepare for graduate study and research careers at least 20 undergraduate students (5 cohorts of 6 students (as many as 12 students per year when cohorts overlap). All students will have 1-3 years of preparation and concentrated research with faculty mentors based in the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB), Sevilleta Long Term Ecological Research (LTER), Biology Department and University Honors Program.

AIM-UP! is a newly funded NSF Research Coordination Network focused on new ways of incorporating the extensive archives and databases of natural history museums into undergraduate education. This year’s theme is Integrated Inventories: Complex Biotic Associations Across Space and Time”. AIM-UP! is refining existing efforts and developing new integrated approaches to collections-based training in large-scale questions using the combined and broad-based expertise of educators, curators, collection managers, database managers, and scientists whose teaching and investigations span various disciplines and relate to topics covering a wide spectrum of time and space. AIM-UP! began as a collaboration between the University of Alaska, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and UNM, but is expanding to other educational institutions, federal agencies, Latin American institutions, and a large museum-based genetic consortium in Canada. Future educational themes to be explored include Geographic Variation, Evolutionary Dynamics of Genomes, Biotic Response to Climate Change, and Co-evolving Communities of Pathogens and Hosts as Related to Emerging Diseases.

If you are interested in finding out more about the activities and objectives of AIM-UP! please visit the website at: http://www.aim-up.org or contact Joseph Cook.

MSB has a stong tradition of undergraduate mentoring:

Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology

Mammalogy Class field trips