IDEA Funding: Funding Period 2024-2025: ScienceWise Podcast
ScienceWise is a podcast series created and hosted by Emilia Huerta Sanchez and Rori Rohlfs. The project aims to provide a podcast-style mentorship from experienced scientists where they share personal stories that shaped their careers, in order to make science more welcoming and amplify the contributions of women. These stories aim to benefit individuals from historically excluded groups by offering career navigation strategies from scientists who may have faced similar highs and lows.
The project addresses these aims by providing this mentorship in an accessible form -a podcast-, centering the voices of scientists from diverse backgrounds and offering actionable advice relevant to people from all career stages.
SMBE IDEA funds supported the production of the second season, along with promotion and outreach efforts. With the second season, featuring a diverse line-up of guests such as Pilar Ossorio, Lisa White, Barbara Wakimoto, and Anne Stone, the podcast expanded its audience and reached over 1000 unique listeners across a broad range of geographic locations, recording over 1700 downloads.
As the SMBE IDEA committee, we are very happy to see this initiative engage with such a diverse audience and directly support inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility principles. You can browse the ScienceWise podcast episodes here https://www.sciencewisepodcast.org/.
Funding period 2023-2024: Resources for Inclusive Evolution Education (RIE2)
Resources for Inclusive Evolution Education (RIE2) has created several teaching modules to educate scientists and improve undergraduate biology education by clarifying core concepts in evolutionary biology and providing relevant historical context. They provided a central repository of science communication and educational tools that address white supremacist, settler-colonial, and capitalist underpinnings of the field and highlight diverse researchers who engage with these concepts as part of their research. By increasing the accessibility of teaching resources, they facilitated communication between researchers and instructors to ultimately improve understanding of these concepts among students and scientists.
Funding period 2022-2023 and 2023-2024: Virtual Lab Meeting Training Program
Science is an international endeavor! To promote equity and inclusion, we ran a Virtual Lab Meeting Training Program for 2022-2023 and 2023-2024! The goal of the program was to promote the exchange of ideas between labs with different academic cultures and make explicit efforts to connect faculty and students in the Molecular Biology and Evolution community across the globe. This program helped mentees develop an international supportive network, provided a pathway for future success, and broadened their knowledge in our field. Since many lab meetings have a virtual component, this was an excellent time to take advantage of these unusual circumstances with a training program.
In this program, they provided training to students at the graduate or early postdoctoral level (“mentees”) by participating in lab meetings of a research group that shares their interests. The mentees participated by attending lab meetings during 2022-2023 or 2023-2024. Two lab meetings were dedicated to the mentee’s professional development. In 2022-2023, we connected 39 graduate students and early postdoctoral researchers (“mentees”) from 15 countries with 32 mentors from 11 countries.
Funding period 2022-2023: EvoBio Crash Course
The EvoBio Crash Course is an ongoing initiative dedicated to providing free, high-quality evolutionary biology education for students across the Global South. Their mission is to remove academic barriers for students who want to pursue a career in Evolutionary Biology by giving them online and certified education. Supported by IDEA funding, the program has seen an incredible surge in interest over the last few years. In their 2022 edition, more than 700 students from 59 countries registered, and the number just keeps growing (1612 students in 2023, and 980 in 2024).
EvoBio understands that education is only half the battle. To help students become truly competitive on the global stage, they offer mini-grants and mentorship. The mini-grants support the "hidden costs" of academia, such as document translation, English certifications, or traveling.
The mentorship program initiative pairs mentees with experienced mentors to help them navigate the complexities of a long-term scientific career.
Some successful stories from students:
"I am currently in the University of Mississippi, doing a Ph.D in Biological Sciences. I did not have enough funds for my air ticket soon after I got admitted to the graduate program and the MGP helped me to travel to the US. Thanks for the assistance.”
- Noah Kilonzo, now coursing a PhD at the University of Mississippi.
“I'm currently preparing to start the master program "Developmental, Neural and Behavioral Biology" at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Thanks to the MGP I was able to be an intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, where I discovered the scientific path I want to follow, I want to study the visual ecology and evolution of behavior in insects. Now I'm part of the Evolution, Behavior and Neurobiology Lab at STRI and I hope I can continue doing science and understand how insects perceive their surroundings in a changing world. Thanks to the MGP I found my way in science and will continue my studies in something I'm really passionate about”
- Claudia Mamani Medina, currently an MSc. Student at the University of Göttingen.
“Currently, I’m at the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut (Uconn). I’m working with plant-insect interaction and their evolution. The MGP financial aid was very important to me since it allowed me to obtain the necessary resources to cover document translations and application fees for the universities I was interested in. Now I’m very happy to be in this department and continue with my research.”
-Jeremy Quiros, now an MSc. Student at the University of Connecticut.
“I thank the MGP team from the bottom of my heart. I am deeply grateful to have received the grant. It covered ahuge chunk of my travel expenses to Barcelona, allowing me to join Dr. Jesus Lozano Fernandez’s Deep Evo Lab at the University of Barcelona. I’ve now started working on my masters' thesis, which focuses on studying the evolution of Ribosomal protein genes, on site, at the University of Barcelona. This support helped me seize hold of the most important opportunity of my academic journey yet, placing me amidst a vibrant academic community.”
-Megha Suresh, MSc. Student currently on an internship at the University of Barcelona
We thank the EvoBio Crash Course for their wonderful project, and we feel proud to have supported this initiative!
Outreach Funding:
Funding period 2024-2025: Evolutionary Biology Olympiad in the State of Rio de Janeiro
The Evolutionary Biology Olympiad in the State of Rio de Janeiro (ORBE24) is an outreach initiative led by Dr. Claudia Russo, Professor of Genetics at the Institute of Biology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. This is the first science Olympiad in the world dedicated to Evolutionary Biology and it was funded by the SMBE IDEA Outreach grant with $10,000 USD.
The project was established to combat the rising anti-science and creationist movements in Brazil by strengthening the scientific knowledge and encouraging social interactions among young people from diverse backgrounds. The program specifically targets students from public high schools in the State of Rio de Janeiro, with the first edition successfully engaging 29 schools and over 700 students.
The Olympiad consists of three phases, beginning with two multiple-choice examinations and culminating in a creative f
inal phase where students develop educational tools, such as podcasts, games, and comic books, to enhance classroom learning. Then, students are invited to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro to participate in hands-on lab experiences in zoology, botany, and computer science alongside mentorship from university professors and present their educational tools to the organizing committee.
Supported by the SMBE, this project bridges the gap between basic education and advanced research and inspires public school students through scientific challenges and research exposure. The initiative not only rewards student excellence through medals, prizes, and travel grants to international science fairs but also compensates dedicated teachers for their role in developing high-level scientific content. Through these efforts, ORBE24 is actively combating misinformation and advocating for science-based knowledge in Brazil.
This initiative perfectly aligns with the SMBE IDEA goals in promoting scientific interests and accessibility among diverse public high school students. You can find more details on this program on their web page https://orbe.bio.br/ and social media platforms.
