Montana Integrative Learning
Experience for Students
Experience for Students
24th National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR)
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"A new generation of empiricists with stronger quantitative skills and of theoreticians with an appreciation for the empirical structure of biological processes will facilitate a bright future for the application of mathematics to solving biological problems"
(Hastings and Palmer, 2003).
Montana Integrative Learning Experience for Students (MILES) brings the excitement of cutting-edge research to undergraduates at The University of Montana. Funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), MILES provides opportunities for students to conduct original research through honors fellowships with mentoring by nationally and internationally recognized faculty researchers.
The mission of MILES is to link faculty and students from diverse backgrounds into a more integrated learning community through innovative teaching and research opportunities with attention to mentoring. We will build on the science reform movement underway at the University of Montana to catalyze, assess, and sustain innovations that better connect teaching and research with learning in all life science courses.
Our vision and overarching theme is one of providing an integrated undergraduate education that crosses traditional disciplines to train future researchers to deal with complex problems in biology. To that end, our curricular reform efforts will increase the education of biology students in mathematical and computational science including modeling and visualization, as well as communication studies and ethics. These disciplines are essential to any effort aimed at comprehensively investigating complex biological and ecological issues, yet most biology students receive only minimal exposure to them in attaining their undergraduate degrees.
Furthermore, the difficulties that arise in integrating empirical studies of organisms that are influenced by their environments at widely disparate spatial and temporal scales provide fertile ground for innovation in mathematics and computer science and we expect those programs to be synergistically stimulated as well.
Funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
