The National Science Foundation recently awarded a five-year, $485,000 Research Coordinating Network grant to UNM's Museum of Southwestern Biology; Museum of the North, University of Alaska; Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California Berkeley; and the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. The Principal Investigator is UNM's Joseph Cook, in the Biology Department.
Cook is joined by co-PI's Steffi Ickert-Bond, University of Alaska. Eileen Lacey, University of California-Berkeley and Scott Edwards, Harvard University.
The project titled, Advancing Integration of Museums into Undergraduate Programs (AIM-UP!), will explore and produce novel ways of incorporating specimen-based science and biodiversity informatics into undergraduate education under themes such as Biotic Associations Across Space & Time; Making Sense of Geographic Variation; Evolutionary Dynamics of Genomes; Biotic Response to Climate Change; and Pathogens, Hosts, & Emerging Diseases. Integration of expertise and experiences across four university museums will stimulate use of natural history collections in the emerging fields of climate change, evolutionary genomics, and molecular ecology.
Instructional tools for museum databases will be made freely available to instructors, scientists and the general public. Outreach efforts are targeted especially to underrepresented students with an emphasis on issues relevant to their communities (e.g., indigenous communities in New Mexico and Alaska).