For Release: July 27, 2012
Contact: Derik Hertel, 603-650-1211 or derik.hertel@dartmouth.edu
NH-INBRE Program Celebrates Second Successful Year of Growing Research Opportunities at New Hampshire Colleges
Hanover, N.H.—More than 215 student researchers, faculty, and administrators from 10 New Hampshire colleges will gather on Monday, July 30 to share discoveries and celebrate the second successful year of a program that has created new research opportunities.
The New Hampshire IDeA Network of Biological Research Excellence (NH-INBRE) is a collaborative network of 2- and 4-year colleges across the state. The goals of the program include increasing opportunities for students and faculty at partner institutions to participate in original scientific research, increasing the bioinformatics infrastructure needed for biomedical research, and enhancing the science and technology training of the state's workforce.
For NH-INBRE, next week's annual meeting, organized and hosted by Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, demonstrates how successful the program has been in its first two years. While last year's inaugural program meeting had a higher-than-expected turnout of 150 participants, more than 215 people have registered to attend this year. The meeting next Monday and Tuesday will be held at the Mountain View Grand Resort in Whitefield, NH, and will feature poster sessions for students to present their work to their peers, faculty and administrators, as well as networking sessions and a workshop to help faculty build their grant writing skills.
"The growth of the meeting reflects the ownership of the NH-INBRE program by the primarily undergraduate institutions themselves," says Ronald Taylor, PhD, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Geisel School of Medicine and the Principle Investigator for NH-INBRE. "The participants are showing support for their own program and their desire to interact with their peers. The increased attendance reflects the statewide impact of the NH-INBRE is greater than the sum of its parts."
The NH-INBRE program began in 2010 with a 5-year, $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire, which both have strong graduate and research programs. The goal was to work with other predominantly undergraduate colleges in the state and help them build their research programs by funding their faculty and research programs and helping them build their own research culture and infrastructure.
To date, eight colleges have joined Dartmouth and UNH in the initiative, including Colby Sawyer College, Franklin Pierce University, Great Bay Community College, Keene State College, New England College, Plymouth State University, River Valley Community College, and Saint Anselm College. The program has funded new research labs and provided training in bioinformatics, which is essential to managing the large amounts of data generated by modern biomedical research.
"The impact of the program on the undergraduate researchers has been enormous," says Taylor. "Depending on the institution, there may have been few if any research opportunities. At institutions where there were such opportunities, they were often sporadic. Now, every NH-INBRE affiliated institution has a program that revolves around the new culture of experiential learning through research opportunities. This new culture has truly been transformative."
The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, founded in 1797, strives to improve the lives of the communities we serve through excellence in learning, discovery, and healing. The nation's fourth-oldest medical school, the Geisel School of Medicine has been home to many firsts in medical education, research and practice, including the discovery of the mechanism for how light resets biological clocks, creating the first multispecialty intensive care unit, the first comprehensive examination of U.S. health care cost variations (The Dartmouth Atlas), and the first Center for Health Care Delivery Science, which launched in 2010. As one of America's top medical schools, Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine is committed to training new generations of diverse physician leaders who will help solve our most vexing challenges in health care.
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