• Your major (and minor or double major if relevant)
• Your GPA if its relatively high (>3.5)
• Previous relevant experience (e.g., coursework, high school research) - not essential but worth pointing out if you have it
• Availability (days/times you have available to devote to research) - big blocks of time are preferable
• Intentions regarding research - faculty are sometimes skeptical of the intentions of premed students. They fear that students are simply checking off the box for research rather than devoting the time necessary to become a productive member of the research team. One semester of research involvement is rarely enough. If you are interested in doing an Honors thesis, applying for an HHMI fellowship, or going to graduate school in the sciences, that is seen as a plus.
• Career aspirations if you know them - see above

• Evidence that you're bright (AP coursework, science awards from high school, participation in selective programs such as Honors or College Park Scholars, high GPA, taking more advanced coursework than is typical)
• Being early in your academic career (they prefer to recruit freshmen and sophomores because they have more than enough time before graduation to become contributing members of the research team, while seniors may never get past the initial training stage)
• A time commitment of multiple semesters
• Summer availability (you have greater time availability and can accomplish more)
• A willingness to volunteer, as opposed to an expectation of being paid (at least at the beginning)
• A sincere interest in the creation of new knowledge, which is what scientific research is all about.

This assignment will be submitted in the Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) system. Go to the CPR Webserver. Choose "Login" from the top menu. Click on "New users: First time logging in?" From this point you will select "University of Maryland-College Park" as your institution and enter your university ID number. You will then get a CPR login and password that you can use to access the system from now on. Please record this in a safe place. Here is a guide for new users, with screen shots of what to expect. The CPR site also has a tour and additional information that will help you learn about how the system works.

Submit your Personal Introduction via the CPR website by Feb. 6. You will then have until Feb. 13 to complete the peer review calibration process, review three introductions written by your classmates and submit a self-assessment of your original summary. Your final grade for this assignment will be based on all of these elements.

Read the following sources:

• GM fears may harm needy, says scientist - New Zealand Herald, January 28, 2010. Although the case study we will discuss took place more than 10 years ago, public mistrust of genetically modified foods is still a concern, as this article shows.
  
  
• Gene Altered Food Study Fuels a Debate - Washington Post, October 15, 1999. Our case study concerns Dr. Arpad Pusztai, a controversial scientist who went outside the usual scientific review procedures to warn the public about what he perceived as harmful impacts of eating genetically modified plants. This newspaper article that provides an overview of the case.
  
  
• Pusztai Published! - Social Issues Research Center. This provides an overview of the controversy surrounding the publication of Pusztai's article in one of the premier, peer reviewed medical journals, The Lancet.
  
  
• The article that the fuss was all about. Ewen, S.W.B. and Pusztai, A. 1999. Effects of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine. Lancet 354:1353-1354.
  
  
• Commentaries by scientists, published by the Lancet in response to the publication of Pusztai's article
  Mowatt commentary
  Fitzgerald et al. commentary
  Lachmann commentary

Based on these readings, reflect on the following question in Blackboard:

• The Social Issues Research Center article speaks of how situations like this cause the public to "lose faith in both science and scientists." What aspect of this case is most troubling to you and makes you lose faith in science?

Write a non-technical summary of a high-impact paper written by a UM faculty member

• Choose an article from the list of faculty publications to summarize. These were all published in either the journal Science or the journal Nature. The full text of both publications is available online if you access it from a campus computer or log in from off campus through the library research port. The online version of the journal Nature only goes back to volume 387 (from 1997). Both journals are of course also available in hard copy at McKeldin Library (including the earlier volumes of Nature).
• Read your article. Your text has some useful guidelines for effective reading of scientific material in Chapter 3 .
• Specific instructions for writing and submitting the summary will be posted on the Calibrated Peer Review website.
• Submit your summary via the CPR website by Feb. 27. You will then have until Mar. 12 to complete the peer review calibration process, review three summaries written by your classmates and submit a self-assessment of your original summary. Your final grade for this assignment will be based on all of these elements.

During your visit to the symposium, you are encouraged to read as many posters as interest you, but you are required to visit at least two. For each poster you visit, ask the HHMI Fellow to describe their research project, including its general significance. You must also ask the HHMI Fellow three questions of your own choosing. These may relate to the research itself, or can be general questions about why they got involved in research, how they feel it has benefited them, etc. Write your questions in the spaces provided on the handout and have the HHMI Fellow you spoke to sign the sheet after you speak. Hand this in to me either at the symposium or in class on March 5.

Over the course of the semester, you will pick 8 faculty members and write a paragraph for each one. If you pick many faculty members that are all doing similar research (e.g., neuroscience), your paragraphs will necessarily be very similar to each other, but they should have some individually distinctive references to the particular faculty member's work. This is your chance to demonstrate that you've done your homework and know a little bit about what the faculty member's reserach team is doing. It is also your chance to demonstrate that you have enthusiasm for this field of research.

• Having been through this exercise that mimics the process of peer review, what have you learned about the process?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• Is it a generally sound way of screening contributions to scientific thought or is there a better way?

Read the article "Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent" and review the supporting materials posted on Blackboard. In at least 500 words answer the questions:

1. Was the Lancet justified in retracting Wakefield's research article?
2. Should Wakefield's license to practice medicine have been revoked?

Provide support for your opinion from the supporting materials and/or your own research into the matter.

• You will break up into groups of 4.
• In class, you will begin to devise a rubric for evaluating the proposals. You can use Appendix F as a guide, but feel free to customize it with any characteristics that you, as a group, agree are important. Although evaluating the budget is usually a part of the proposal review process, for the purposes of this assignment assume that all the budgets are reasonable.
• Each person will read a packet of four proposals (Proposal A, Proposal B, Proposal C, or Proposal D).
• After all group members have had a chance to read all proposals, you should meet as a group to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each (using your rubric). Appoint someone in your group to record your discussions.
• At the end of your discussion, your group should prepare a brief summary and comprehensive critique of each proposal. You should summarize the proposed research in 2-3 sentences, then evaluate the proposal using the criteria outlined in your rubric.
• Finally, your group must make funding recommendations. Only 2 of the 4 proposals can be funded. Which ones will you fund?
• Your report should be written and submitted as a group effort (i.e., one report turned in per group).
• Each member of the group will receive the same grade, so it's important that all group members contribute substantially to the final product. The final document should be based on your group discussions and the formatting should be consistent throughout (as opposed to 4 separate critiques written in different styles and with different degrees of detail). Your grade will be based on the quality of your rubric and your ability to effectively critique each of the proposals.

For this assignment you will follow the development of a scientific idea through the research papers of a faculty member.

1. Pick a faculty member. You can pick any faculty member on campus, as long as their research is in some way related to Biology, Biochemistry, or Chemistry. (If you are majoring in another science field, you may choose a faculty member from that field instead.) Adjunct and Affiliate faculty are allowable; Professors Emeriti are not.
   
   
2. Choose a recent paper by your faculty member. The paper should have been published within the past 3 years (i.e., in 2009, 2010 or 2011). The paper must be an original research paper published in a peer-reviewed journal (not a popular journal, such as Scientific American or Science Digest). The faculty member need not be first author. Their name can appear anywhere in the list of authors.
   
   
3. Choose a second paper by the same faculty member that is related to the first. This will generally be an older paper that appears in the Literature Cited section of your first paper, but it could be a more recent paper that cites the first.
   
   
4. Read both papers thoroughly, concentrating on the introduction, results and discussion.
   
   
5. Summarize the progression of the faculty member's research in no more than one single spaced page, including references. The summary should track the development of their scientific ideas, rather than being a series of "book reports" on the individual studies. That is, you should identify the common thread between the papers - something that links them both together. You want to be able to show how a scientific idea changed over time, or the various experimental steps used to confirm or refute a hypothesis.

   Listed below are some points you may wish to consider as you develop your summary. Not all will apply to every set of papers, but they may help you organize your thoughts.

   • Did the papers address a controversy in scientific thought or attempt to fill a gap in knowledge?
   • Did the results of the first paper generate new hypotheses that were tested in the second paper?
   • Alternatively, were both papers testing different facets of a single complex hypothesis?
   • Were the conclusions of the two papers complementary or contradictory?
   • How did the two studies collectively extend our understanding of scientific concepts and processes?
   • After the second paper, was the initial hypothesis well supported, or were additional experiments necessary to clarify things?
   • What future directions remained to be explored after both studies were completed?
   • Did the two studies lead to major changes in scientific thought (what we refer to as a paradigm shift)? Did they upend log-held beliefs?
   
   
   
6. Suggest a logical "next question" for the research to address. This could be something that the authors mention in their paper or something that occurred to you while reading the papers.