Enhancing Undergraduate Education and Curriculum through an Interdisciplinary and Quantitative Initiative to Broaden Participation in Big Data

Abstract

Representation of Hispanics, especially Hispanic women, is notoriously low in data science programs in higher education and in the tech industry. The engagement of undergraduate students in research, often and early in their path towards degree completion, has been championed as one of the principal reforms necessary to increase the number of capable professionals in STEM. The benefits attributed to undergraduate research experiences have been reported to disproportionately benefit individuals from groups that have been historically underrepresented in STEM. The IDI-BD2K (Increasing Diversity in Interdisciplinary Big Data to Knowledge) Program funded by the NIH at the XXXXXXwas designed to bridge the increasing digital and data divide at the university. The college’s population is 98% Hispanic, it is one of the top 20 producers of Hispanic PhDs in Science and Engineering and yet there is no formal data science program. There also exists a gender imbalance in computing at the College of Natural Sciences at the XXXX. Over 60% of the undergraduate students in Biology are women. However, the percentage of women in Computer Science hovers around 15%. The IDI-BD2K was created to address these concerns and increase the participation of Hispanics in interdisciplinary computational and quantitative research in XXXX. The Interdisciplinary and Quantitative Biology Research Experience for Undergraduates (IQ-Bio-REU) summer program forked off from the IDI-BD2K and was created to engage ten (10) underrepresented undergraduate students from the US and its territories in authentic research experiences in emerging fields of biology which integrate quantitative and computational approaches to projects ranging from molecular biosciences to bioinformatics to ecology to bridge the digital and data divide for Hispanics and women in computing. This paper documents the additions to curriculum as a result of the IDI-BD2K, the first summer of the IQ-Bio-REU and highlights the importance of mutually beneficial collaborations with top research institutions to make it possible.