Recipient Organization
MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
BOZEMAN,MT 59717
Performing Department
College of Agriculture
Non Technical Summary
Labor market orojection estimatethat the number of workers with training and expertise in crop and plant science will not meet demand over the next decade. This is further amplified by the need to workers with training in both plant science and data science. More and more big data is being collected plant production but not enoughpeople are trained in both areas, which is especially important to support the production of resilient crops when food security is threatened. Therefore, we have developed a PhD training program, Accessible Leadership Learning through Interdisciplinary Unified Mentoring, ALLIUM to be homed in the Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology department at Montana State University.Fellows will be recruited from groups that have been underrepresented in agriculture, specifically Native America and Indigenous, of whom many call Montana home.ALLIUM Fellows will receive interdisplinary training across plant and data science to combat the dearth of needed experts. Fellows will also develop their leadership skills through a book club, training seminars, and a team project. The programming will also be open to other students, thus having a broader impact beyond Fellows, including contact with an industry partner. Importantly Fellows will also receive extensive structured mentoring to ensure retention and career counseling. The program will be evaluated for impact to identify successes and needed improvement.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
The major goal of this project is to build the United States' capacity in Plant Productionthrough the establishment of a training program for PhD students focuses on the integration between plant and data science and leadership.Objective 1: Complete recruitment of Native American and Indigenous students to diversify the multicultural diversity of experts in plant production through a partnership with the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership.Objective 2: Select students through a holistic process intended to increase the nubmer of outstanding students from underrepresented groups to be admitted.Objective 3: Implementa course-based curriculum for students addressing displinary knowledge, and technical and transferable skills.Objective 4: ProvideFellows with leadership training each year of the fellowship through new and established programming.Objective 5: Provide structured, extensive mentoring and network development forFellows.Objective 6: Assess the quality and impact of the training program.
Project Methods
This project is establishing a training program for three (to be determined) outstanding PhD students housed in the department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology at Montana State University. We have devised a program that is accessible and interdisciplinary with leadership training and structure mentoring. We will evaluate the program with an external assessor.For recruitment of students to the program, we will focus special attention on American Indian and Indigenous students. American Indian and Indigenous are underrepresented in agriculture production. Further, Montana, the home of the program at Montana State University (MSU) has a large population of American Indian and Indigenous people, at 6.5%. To do so, we have teamed up with the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership at MSU. This program is a scholarship program across a network of United States' universities supporting Indigenous graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This program includes a $40,000 scholarship for the scholars. This was be very important to fully fund PhD students who will pursue their degrees past the duration of the NNF program which is only three years and not enough time to complete most PhDs.MSU and the Graduate School is pursuing adopting holistic admissions for our graduate programs. In holistic admissions, careful rubrics are created to identify students with the potential for success, looking beyond standard metrics like GPA and GRE that favor majority students. The graduate training program will utilize this approach to select and admit outstanding fellows to the program.Fellows will complete a curriculum that addresses disciplinary, transferable, and technical skills. Disciplinary courses and technical courses can be easier to identify than courses that impart transferable skills. Therefore, from surveying Plant Sciences faculty, we have established a set of courses that practice the transferable skills that MSU Plant Sciences faculty believe are important for PhD students to practice (oral presentations, technical writing, critical thinking, teamwork, and others). We will require Fellows to complete courses that address disciplinary knowledge and transferable and technical skills. In addition, we will be developing courses for students. The first course is focused on gaining technical skills through data science club where Fellows and other interested Plant Sciences students will work with three mentors to analyze a plant genomics data set. In addition, the industry partner will attend data science presentations to provide insight and feedback to students. This will occur during the Fellows' first year.In addition to the courses described above, Fellows will have three structure opportunities to develop leadership skills. The Fellows will complete a leadership book club, to learn, discuss, and reflect on varied approaches to leadership and develop their own philosophy. In the second opportunity, Fellows will complete the MSU Graduate Schools Inner Mountain Community Leadership program that consists of a collaborative leadership project developed with a team. The third piece of programming is the Entering Mentoring seminar where Fellows will receive support and training in best practices for mentoring undergraduates in research.During a PhD, students are best served by a network of mentors. We will provide structured mentoring for Fellows outside of their individual advisor. Fellows will meet with program PDs for quarterly meetings to support their training, development, and career goals.The quality and impact of the program will be assessed in a number of ways. First, we will work with an external assessor to survey Fellows and participating faculty upon entry to understand their perspective of the program with a focus on research, critical thinking, content knowledge, communication, ethics, service, teaching and leadership to determine change in skills and abilities. Similar questions will be asked at the end of the program Success of the program will be measured through retention of fellows, course work, participation in Book and Data Mining Clubs, completion of leadership activities, number of publications produced, entry of Fellow in the plant production workforce. The results of the program or a case study will be shared with the broader scientific community through publication.