A one-of-a-kind program at ASU West gives undergrads the doctoral treatment.
“Undergrads researching treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s – can you imagine it?”
Lauren Griswold, marketing and media relations manager for ASU West’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, says this as we walk toward a small classroom laboratory on campus. We won’t have to “imagine” anything for long – inside the lab, a handful of students wearing purple latex gloves and white lab coats squint at color-coded data on computer monitors against the humming electrical backdrop of the refrigerators, which house human colon cancer cells they’re growing for experiments. Under the guidance of Dr. Peter Jurutka, the students are probing the potential of vitamin D for reducing the risk of colon cancer and mitigating the effects of Alzheimer’s. “By the time the students are leaving the lab, they have worked on their own projects,” Jurutka says. “They have learned a vast number of molecular… techniques, and they’re doing work that one would characterize at the level of a graduate student.” And yet none of the students have a bachelor’s degree.
This research project is one of 20 being conducted at ASU West this semester, under the umbrella of a revolutionary program called NCUIRE (New College Undergraduate Inquiry & Research Experiences). Launched in the spring of 2011 by Todd Sandrin, Associate Dean of the New College and director of NCUIRE, the program puts undergraduate students and faculty together across a range of disciplines for research projects that both enrich the students’ learning experiences and have a real-world impact, whether the goal is to discover potential cancer-curbing “chemopreventives” in vitamin D or collect the oral histories of Arizonans for storage as a public resource in the ASU Repository.
The program gives undergrads a valuable leg up in a tough millennial job market.
Duku Anokye is associate professor of Africana language, literature and culture at ASU West. Her students, Courtney Burgmann and Alexya Haro, are interviewing and videotaping Arizona natives sharing their memories of notable people, places and events in the state for the NCUIRE project “Telling Arizona.” But because interviewing people for research projects technically makes them “human subjects,” students had to obtain approval for the research from the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Anokye was able to walk them through that process. “This is not some research that is made up for the purpose of teaching them. It is bringing them into the kind of research that faculty are already doing,” Anokye says. “Students have had the opportunity to publish in important journals along with the faculty, they’ve had opportunities to go to conferences and sit on panels at professional meetings. This is a unique experience for undergraduate students.”
And performing what is essentially graduate-level research also makes students more appealing to employers. “We hear from faculty across the disciplines that students perform at a level far above the undergraduate level, as if they are master’s or doctoral students,” Sandrin says. “And it’s not just our faculty. The community that hires these folks says, ‘What you’re doing is giving them the skills and expertise you kind of expect them to get after they graduate.’”
Sandrin hopes the NCUIRE budget will permit 30 more awards in the spring. Students interested in awards must submit a proposal, which Sandrin says matters more than their GPA: “We recognize that a lot of students who have passion may have had other things going on that prevented them from having that 3.99 GPA. Everyone goes in on an even keel. It’s the pitch.”
Beginning their freshman year, students can apply for one of four types of awards, with cash stipends ranging from $625 to $3,500. Students do not yet receive credit in the program, but say the benefits of working with faculty are inestimable. “This research is outstanding,” says Marya Sabir, a senior who started working in Dr. Jurutka’s lab as a freshman. “When you go into the classroom, you learn all of these [scientific] principles, that you then come here and apply and you see how it plays out in the real world. I think that is probably the most fascinating.”
Sabir plans to go into a dual MD-Ph.D program after graduation. “This has really fortified for me that this is the career I want,” she says. “I absolutely love doing research.”
Notable NCUIRE Projects
“Learning from Database Performance Benchmarks” by Jennifer Ortiz (student) with Suzanne Dietrich (faculty): published in the Journal of Computing in Small Colleges
“The Putative Role of Resveratrol in Sirt-1 Mediated Modulation of the Vitamin D Pathway” by Angelika Dampf Stone (student) with Peter Jurutka (faculty): presented at the Arizona State Capitol
“Documenting the foraging, mating and anti-predator behavior of urban and desert black widows” by Rebecca Halpin (student) with Chad Johnson (faculty): presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
