Education, Outreach, and Training

About

The iPlant Collaborative’s education and training efforts are preparing the next generation of scientists and educators to develop and use computational approaches and cyberinfrastructure in innovative, interdisciplinary plant science research and teaching. It’s public outreach effort is building appreciation and enthusiasm for contemporary plant biology.

Plant scientists are mastering new ways of thinking and working as biology increasingly focuses on the study of complex systems of interacting genes, molecules, cells and organisms. Critical thinking approaches commonly used in computer science, mathematics and statistics are crucial for advancing the plant sciences. Every day researchers use strategies such as maximum parsimony algorithms to build phylogenetic trees, mathematical models to study photosynthesis, and quantitative trait locus analysis to link genes to traits.

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a community comprised of national and international experts and educators in plant sciences, computing sciences and computational biology. By integrating education, outreach and training throughout it’s activities, iPlant provids a variety of opportunities to develop critical thinking (“computational thinking”) skills. Researchers and students from multiple disciplines are learning to communicate and work together to design and build the cyberinfrastructure as members of iPlant Grand Challenge project teams. iPlant’s Discovery Environments connect educators with researchers and provide access to data and tools making it possible to engage students in distributed research projects. Through workshops, learning modules, research internships and education-focused sabbaticals iPlant offers a variety of education and training approaches designed to prepare researchers, educators and students to use cyberinfrastructure and apply critical thinking approaches to innovative, interdisciplinary plant science research and teaching. iPlant also shares the excitement of contemporary plant biology and its grand challenge questions with the public to foster appreciation of the plant sciences. iPlant’s dynamic community is dedicated to learning and discovery in the fascinating, complex world of plants.