Montgomery College, in Maryland, is a three-campus community college serving over 50,000 students represented from more than 160 countries. If you are interested to teach Biology in a diverse community college environment, look out for part-time faculty announcements in the provided link! Job positions will be advertised about two months before the start of a semester.

BioQUEST Contact: Vedham Karpakakunjaram

In 2019, UC Berkeley, UCSF, Johnson & Johnson Innovation and Janssen Research & Development came together to establish the Data Science Health Innovation Fellowship Program, to bring together experienced data scientists with academic and industry researchers, to facilitate collaboration among scientists, engineers, clinicians, and entrepreneurs, to tackle complex problems in health and patient care and to accelerate innovation in healthcare through data-driven approaches.

This fellowship program offers a two-year research and entrepreneurial opportunity for seasoned data science professionals to apply computer science, data science, data engineering, and computational statistics research and development principles, along with relevant domain science knowledge, to complex problems and datasets, to advance understanding of health and improve patient care by providing meaningful clinical insights. The fellowship program will recruit serial cohorts of up to five outstanding data scientists per year from industry and academia. We are seeking applications from a wide range of backgrounds and with specializations across the burgeoning field of data science, such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, developing and optimizing methodologies, software, and tools while working with various large datasets. The datasets Fellows have worked with may be healthcare related, such as electronic medical records, clinical notes, medical images, high-content microscopy and ‘omics, or should have comparable levels of scale and complexity. Fellows will receive training, support, and guidance from domain science and medical experts, including a mentor from each of the three collaborating organizations. The primary responsibility of the Fellows is to successfully identify and conduct interdisciplinary data-intensive research related to healthcare and use computational and data science technology as a tool to accomplish the aims of the research. 

BioQUEST Contact: Perot Saelao

We seek candidates with a Ph.D. in Chemistry who have a strong commitment to pedagogy and a specific interest in teaching undergraduate lecture and laboratory courses with a preference for biomolecular chemistry. Applicants with prior teaching experience are encouraged to apply. More information is available in the attached link. To ensure full consideration, all materials should be received by October 15, 2019.

BioQUEST Contact: Pat Marsteller

We seek candidates with a Ph.D. in the biological sciences and a strong commitment to pedagogy and a specific interest in teaching and advising undergraduates. Applicants having prior experience with evidence-based teaching practices are encouraged to apply; postdoctoral experience is preferred. More information is in the attached PDF. Review of applications will begin November 1, 2019

BioQUEST Contact: Pat Marsteller

From CAST, this updated version of the three principles of UDL has suggested checkpoints

Resource from CAST on developing learning goals

I integrated a BAG module (using the methods to assemble certain genes) into a "standard" Molec Biol course.

This is a syllabus where Build-a-Phage was implemented in the laboratory portion of a semester-long elective course for majors. 

This "bundle" contains all resources in the Ethics in Synthetic Biology collection.  

While this article focuses on public health, the discussion of decolonizing data is valuable: Decolonizing data is where "the community itself is the one determining what is the information they want us to gather. Why are we gathering it? Who's interpreting it? And are we interpreting it in a way that truly serves our communities? Decolonizing data is about controlling our own story, and making decisions based on what is best for our people. That hasn't been done in data before, and that's what's shifting and changing."

Montgomery College, in Maryland, is a three-campus community college serving over 50,000 students represented from more than 160 countries. If you are interested to teach Biology in a diverse community college environment, look out for part-time faculty announcements in the provided link! Job positions will be advertised about two months before the start of a semester.

We revised our capstone seminar around this method. It is a good way for scaffolding a research article.

Introducing students to cases

Writing cases with some assessment examples

Favorite cases article

• The integration of data-­centric teaching practices plays a major role in efforts to transform biology education. Working with authentic data increases student exposure to scientific practices and contributes to the development of quantitative skills.  

• Bring large-­scale ecological data into the classroom can be challenging, where the skills required to manipulate and analyze these data sets can be a large hurdle for both educators and students.  

• We share the outcomes from a partnership between university/college faculty, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis project (QUBES) to develop and disseminate teaching resources that use NEON data and provide training and community to faculty. 

• The NEON FMN has been offered for three semesters with 37 faculty participating, resulted in a wide variety of new and adapted modules being publicly available.

• We found the QUBES-FMN model to be successful in providing online professional development and creating communities of educators without geographic barriers.  Our work highlights how this model of curriculum development and faculty engagement has been successfully applied to NEON data for the classroom. 

https://apply.interfolio.com/65936

"We seek a scholar or scholar/practitioner in cultural studies, literature, or performing/studio arts who is attentive to hierarchies of power and privilege and can offer cross-cultural and/or transnational perspectives on environmental traditions. Fields and research approaches are open, but could include: critical race theory, ecocriticism and nature writing, ecofeminism/feminist environmentalism, energy humanities, indigenous and post-colonial/decolonial/decolonizing environmentalisms, posthumanism and animal studies, and queer ecologies. Applicants with a demonstrated record of working successfully with a diversity of students, including underrepresented and marginalized populations, are encouraged to apply."

This is an email that was written by Gary Ritchie to Raymond Tremblay in response to our query about screen readers and R studio.

From: Gary Ritchie <gary@rstudio.com>
Date: July 17, 2019 at 1:09:36 PM EDT
To: Hadley Wickham <hadley@rstudio.com>
Cc: Raymond L Tremblay Lalande <raymond.tremblay@upr.edu>

Hi. Yes, I am working on making the RStudio IDE accessible in the next release (1.3), and happy to talk about it.

We (RStudio) do recognize the importance of this. Unfortunately it is a retro-fit, rather than something that was baked in from the start, so it's a major undertaking. I'm happy to talk to any interested parties about progress and plans, and share early builds once they have reached a useful level of functionality.

More background:

RStudio Server is a web application, used via a web browser, thus subject to web accessibility guidelines and technologies.

RStudio Desktop is also a web application! It's essentially the same web application as RStudio Server but displayed in a desktop shell using the Chromium browser (the open-source core of Google Chrome). There are some additional accessibility challenges due to this, still being worked through, and right now I'm focused on the shared RStudio Server aspects.

I am targeting WCAG 2.1 level AA compliance, testing primarily with VoiceOver/Safari on Mac, and FireFox/NVDA on Windows. I do also conduct some tests with other combinations of screen readers and web browsers, including Chrome, JAWS, and Narrator. Naturally as part of this working towards full usability with keyboard-only, and voice-control.

In order to release RStudio 1.3 in a reasonable amount of time (very tentatively aiming for first half of 2020), I don't expect to achieve full compliance for every nook and cranny of the RStudio IDE (though I will try). Any known exceptions will be called out in our WCAG/VPAT assessment documents.

I am aware that "compliance" with things such as WCAG does not always translate to genuine "usability", and early testing and feedback from real users will be greatly appreciated.

You can see actual code-level changes as they are made in this Github project board: https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/projects/4

Thanks,

Gary