The central objective of the UWM-UBM program is to provide cohorts of undergraduate students with crossdisciplinary education in Biology and Mathematics with emphasis on collaborative learning through original research projects.
It is clear that biology is rapidly becoming an increasingly quantitative discipline, integrating the tools of mathematical and computational sciences to investigate very complex phenomena, and that collegiate education have to reflect this. As pointed out by the study BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education For Future Research Biologists: “The emphasis on integration is particularly important at the introductory level (i.e., first year or two of college), because a large part of the goal is to show the students how each discipline contributes to understanding the phenomena of life, how these animate phenomena understood and represented using quantitative techniques of phenomena in the inanimate world, and how new techniques emerge to meet the challenges of representing and predicting the behavior of systems of living organisms. Integration will allow students to learn the languages of the different disciplines in context.”
The central theme of the program is mathematical modeling and analysis of aquatic ecosystems. The aquatic sciences provide a good focus point for our initiative because the importance of physical and chemical processes in such systems require that biologists contend with a higher level of mathematical content than is often the case in some other areas of biology. Moreover, this is a very natural and relevant topic for us given our location at the shores of Lake Michigan and the large interest and stakes that the nation has in restoring and preserving the health of the Great Lakes.
The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee is an ideal place to undertake the proposed work in many respects. Within Biological Sciences there is a long tradition of aquatic ecology and interdisciplinary collaboration through the Center for Great Lakes Studies (CGLS) that has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Faculty in Biological Science work closely with academic staff at the Wisconsin Aquatic Technology & Environmental Research (WATER) Institute, a University of Wisconsin System research facility administered by the Graduate School of UWM. WATER is home to CGLS, the Aquaculture and Fisheries Research Center, the NIEHS Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center, a center of the National Undersea Research Program and the Center for Water Security. From its dockside site in the port of Milwaukee, the WATER Institute represents the only major aquatic research institution located on Lake Michigan and the largest U.S. institution of its kind in the Great Lakes region. The institute belongs to the National Association of Marine Laboratories, and conducts multi- disciplinary research using truly oceanographic approaches. UWM is an urban campus, yet it is within walking distance of Lake Michigan’s shoreline.
Through the sponsoring entities of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (i.e. the Departments of Biological and Mathematical Sciences and the Great Lakes WATER Institute) we have access to various assets (laboratories, research vessels, data collection devices, and theoretical expertise in both biology and applied mathematics) that are actively involved in related research, and the UBM program will serve as a venue to combine our expertise and jointly mentor students to better prepare them scientifically and professionally for further studies or careers in fields at the interface of mathematical and biological sciences.