CSUMB and UCSC to Launch Program on Postdoctoral Training and Mentorship
Dr. Aparna Sreenivasan, Associate Professor in the Department of Biology and Chemistry, is currently serving as the Principal Investigator (PI) on a collaborative program between California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
This January, Postdoctoral fellows from UCSC will begin a teaching-focused program sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This program, called Institutional Research and Academic Career Development (IRACDA), is a collaboration between UCSC’s Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells and CSUMB’s Department of Biology and Chemistry.
The NIH-IRACDA focuses on blending a strong postdoctoral research program with a scholarly approach to learning teaching pedagogical practice and mentoring. The collaboration leverages a more than 25-year relationship with Dr. Aparna Sreenivasan, UCSC's Principal Investigator Dr. Lindsay Hinck, and the science programs at UCSC. The experienced teaching professors at CSUMB will serve as mentors to UCSC postdoctoral fellows, who in turn will mentor CSUMB students in research and academic success.
Throughout their three years at CSUMB, the postdoctoral fellows will also conduct in-class observations, design their own lectures, teach those lectures in their CSUMB mentors’ classes, and eventually design their own stand-alone course. The focus on pedagogical practice, scholarly consideration with regard to teaching, and high impact practices in CSUMB's Department of Biology and Chemistry as well as UCSC's Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells' high level research program are the major reasons that the two institutions were awarded the NIH grant.
For more information about the program, check out the NIH-IRACDA web page or contact Dr. Aparna Sreenivasan at asreenivasan@csumb.edu.