Freshman Research Initiative

Freshman Research Initiative

Founded	2005
Focus	Education Through Research
Location	The University of Texas at Austin
Key people	Dr. Erin Dolan, Executive Director
Website	https://cns.utexas.edu/fri

The Freshman Research Initiative (FRI), developed at the University of Texas at Austin, is an innovative model in undergraduate education that offers hundreds of first-year students in the College of Natural Sciences the opportunity to advance academically while doing cutting-edge, authentic, publishable research in chemistry, biochemistry, nanotechnology, molecular biology, physics, astronomy and computer sciences.

The collaborative efforts of Sarah Simmons, David Laude, Ruth Shear, in addition to a group of faculty members at the College of Natural Sciences, led to the launch of FRI in 2005. The pilot program started with 45 students enrolled in three Research Streams; Vertebrate Interactome Mapping Stream, which was established by Scott Stevens, the Aptamer Stream led by Andy Ellington and The Nanomaterials for Chemical Catalysis Stream, which was established by Keith Stevenson, David Vanden Bout and Richard Crooks.

Currently, about 800 freshmen each year are enrolled in the 26 different Research Streams within FRI. Each Research Stream is led by a faculty member who has designed a program of research using our educational model to pursue their fundamental research questions. These faculty provide guidance to their respective Research Streams, set goals and directions, and develop and teach the Research Experience courses to the students within their stream. Each Research Stream has its own dedicated lab, which is run by a Research Educator (RE), a Ph.D. research scientist dedicated to the stream. Major funding for this program has been provided by National Science Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Students who participate in the FRI are 30-35% more likely to graduate with a science degree and 23% more likely to go to graduate school. In addition the program is significantly boosting the number of Hispanic students majoring in science, and approximately 103 students have been included as authors of published research papers (R. I. Shear, S. L. Simmons. Teaching through research: Five-year outcome data from the Freshman Research Initiative at The University of Texas at Austin. Presented at American Chemical Society 67th Southwest Regional Meeting, Austin, TX, Nov 11, 2011)

References

External links

https://cns.utexas.edu/fri

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