The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering is partnering with Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the lead institution, on a new, multi-institutional effort funded by the National Science Foundation to improve mentorship and expand opportunities for undergraduate research experiences in engineering.
The $699,071 award, distributed over the next three years through NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, will support the creation of an Undergraduate Research Excellence Network (UREN).
The project is being guided at Rose-Hulman by Irene Reizman, PhD, associate professor of Chemical Engineering. Maysam Nezafati, senior lecturer, and Todd Fernandez, director of Learning Innovation and senior lecturer, are leading the project at Coulter BME. Other partner institutions include Lawrence Technological University, Baylor University, and the University of Washington Tacoma.
“This award highlights our team’s effort to transform undergraduate research through our ‘Entrepreneurial Mindset’ framework built around curiosity, connection, and value creation,” said Nezafati. "We’ve demonstrated that undergraduate research can foster authentic motivation, ownership, and innovation.”
“Learning the process of research and developing an identity as an independent thinker is a critical part of an engineering education, and nearly 70% of Coulter BME students participate in research as part of their degree,” said Fernandez. “Improving training for research mentors helps both mentors and mentees grow as researchers and as independent thinkers.”
The UREN will provide coaching, training materials, and workshops to help faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students strengthen their approaches to mentoring undergraduate researchers. A focus of the network will be helping students adopt an entrepreneurial mindset—encouraging them to take ownership of projects and see how their work can create value.
The collaboration will also build on existing training materials, such as activities and videos for undergraduate researchers and mentors, originally developed with support from the Kern Family Foundation. Seed funding from the Kern Family Foundation helped bring together the partner institutions for this proposal.
Fernandez says, “The training tools in this award will help amplify the effects of good mentors and help those still growing as mentors in ways that will help students not just learn but thrive.”
Nezafati added, “Our findings showed that when students approach research with an entrepreneurial mindset, they grow as independent scholars while also contributing to the creativity and productivity of their labs. This recognition reinforces the importance of linking educational research with real-world practice to prepare the next generation of researchers.”
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 2439260. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
