What is the future for synthesis education, or more particularly quantitative approaches with organismal focus? Lou Gross suggested this topic, citing recent topics that call for more mathematical literacy in biology, eg in MCAT requirements.
2 thoughts on “Synthesis Education”
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The group is talking about taking on training in quantitative approaches at a big scale – ecoinformatics and analytics together – a major effort in training that crosses professional sectors. We all need to build capacity for these approaches, big initiatives like NEON need this capacity, along with the distributed sensor projects, individual labs getting more serious about data issues. The key is to be collaborative, bringing in expertise across synthesis centers, and across existing initiatives. A next step would be to generate a list of topics that would serve various sectors and communities – cross off the list those that are already being done by others.
The training institute should be the community’s training institute – delivered by and for the community – not a small group of experts delivering specialized knowledge