Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) can provide undergraduate students access to research opportunities when student and faculty resources are limited. In addition to expanding research opportunities, CUREs may also be explored as a pedagogical tool for improving student learning of course content and laboratory skills, as well…

The medical field is facing a physician-scientist shortage, threatening future medical research and development. Medical institutions can contribute to developing physician-scientists by stimulating students' involvement in research. In this study, a medical undergraduate teaching module to develop research skills and encourage interest in…

In a typical undergraduate biology curriculum, students do not dive into research until they first wade through large amounts of content. Biology courses in the first few years of the college curriculum tend to be lecture-based and exam-based courses. As a result, science students are mainly exposed to content knowledge--not the skills scientists…

An approach for incorporating preliminary drug discovery research into a biochemistry laboratory is described. During a total of 42 hr (one 3-hr laboratory section a week for 14 weeks), students were exposed to bioinformatics; molecular cloning; protein expression, purification, and characterization; and enzymatic kinetic assays. This…

Journal clubs are well regarded as a highly effective means of engaging graduate students with the contemporary research literature, where individual students prepare and deliver presentations on selected research articles to their peers, followed by a group discussion. Regular journal clubs have the advantage of enhancing student scientific…

We present a new highly interdisciplinary project-based course in computer aided drug discovery (CADD). This course was developed in response to a call for alternative pedagogical approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the cancellation of a face-to-face summer research program sponsored by the Louisiana Biomedical Research Network…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide an efficient mechanism to provide many students with an original research project. CUREs often culminate in a capstone poster presentation, but reports on these classes usually focus on the preparation and execution of the project rather than communication of the results. This article…

Experimental teaching is an important part of postgraduate training in basic and clinical medicine. While primary cell isolation and identification are among the most important research techniques for medical graduate students, most graduate students do not understand and master these techniques before starting their research experience. In…

Research experience is becoming an increasingly crucial element of today's undergraduate science curriculum. In recent years, the establishment of the Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience Network (CUREnet) has provided a framework for the development of courses aiming to cultivate students' proficiency in undergraduate research…

Undergraduate laboratory courses are essential to teaching core principles in STEM. This course, Quantitative Biological Methods, provides a unique approach to teaching molecular biology research techniques to students, in a laboratory that is delivered in a sequence that parallels standard biomedical research laboratory protocols. Students attend…

Dimensionality reduction techniques are essential in analyzing large 'omics' datasets in biochemistry and molecular biology. Principal component analysis, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding, and uniform manifold approximation and projection are commonly used for data visualization. However, these methods can be challenging for students…

An explosion of data available in the life sciences has shifted the discipline toward genomics and quantitative data science research. Institutions of higher learning have been addressing this shift by modifying undergraduate curriculums resulting in an increasing number of bioinformatics courses and research opportunities for undergraduates. The…

The number of undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds enrolled in science and technology-related courses has increased over the past 20 years, but these students' persistence in STEM majors until graduation still lags behind the overall college population. Interventions like exposure to independent research, instruction using…

Presently, a variety of policies and measures has implemented to enhance the scientific research and innovation ability of medical students, but in the process of practice, there are many problems, such as they lack of independent topic selection ability, weak scientific research skills, lack of autonomous learning ability, the research results…

This innovative comprehensive experiment is a compulsory course for third-year undergraduate students in the eight-year training program leading to a Doctor of Medicine degree or Doctor of Philosophy degree at Peking University Health Science Center (PKUHSC). There is a critical educational need to prepare these students for the increasing…