Proposal to provide Broader Impacts packages to faculty and departments who are interested in running student pods in their departments. This mechanism will attempt to provide additional funding by increasing the total # of students who pay the full rate. The goal is for this to require very little paperwork because NSF funds belonging to a given PI at a given department could be used as student registration fees. This means we don’t need to engage as contractors with the schools.
Benefits:
This benefits NM by increasing both the total number of students and the proportion of full-cost paying students.
This benefits PIs by providing an easy mechanism to satisfy BI in a substantive way. PIs already do use boilerplate BI mechanisms, such as engaging with an existing high-school outreach project. However, many schools don’t have these boilerplate mechanisms. Also, many of those off-campus outreach programs don’t benefit their own research program, because students are too young. This mechanism would potentially allow PIs to recruit new lab members with a common base of expertise.
This benefits students by allowing them to engage in NMA at no cost to themselves and provides a local cluster of expertise in one of the NMA courses with potential of an ongoing project. They also get to indicate a monetary award on their CV.
Basic idea:
A PI at a given school would include text in their NSF grant proposing to run a summer Neuromatch workshop at their school, where 5-30 monetary awards would be given out to students within a given summer. The students would take the course virtually and the PI could choose to augment this experience in some way if they wished for a more engaging experience. I.e. perhaps continuing to develop their NMA projects after the course is over.
This could be adapted to many different needs for a given NSF grant and with no real additional paperwork on our part apart from providing a boilerplate letter of support to the PI that says we are happy to support them.
For example:
Small pool of grads within a grad program
Small pool of undergrads within an R1
Small pool of undergrads at a SLAC, or HBCU
REU funding or generic NSF BI funds