Lucas Faculty Fellow Experience: Greg Boyce

June 08, 2020 / Greg Boyce, PhD / Tags: Lucas Faculty Fellow, fellows

The Lucas Center Faculty Fellow Program provides an excellent platform for faculty to bring attention to an important topic that could benefit the wider campus community. Each of the faculty fellows in the inaugural class focused on an area of expertise that they could discuss with the wider faculty community. I focused on exploring undergraduate research as a mentoring opportunity since undergraduate research is a high-impact teaching practice with well-documented effects on student learning. I believe that our research should be a vehicle to enrich our students’ education. As a Lucas fellow, I had the opportunity to engage with faculty from diverse fields and facilitate a Faculty Learning Community where faculty could learn from each other in the implementation of their research ideas with students and cultivate new collaborations across disparate fields. This fellowship provided me the opportunity to learn from faculty and together explore the best practices in undergraduate research. We also discussed how to provide accessibility to research opportunities for underrepresented students, project management, funding sources, and what our goals were for our research students. We also read and discussed primary literature on the effects of undergraduate research on student learning and on best mentoring practices.