Presenting Author
Texas A&M University
ASK ME ABOUT:
THE NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH DIRECTORS PROGRAM FOR UNDEREPRESENTED POSTDOCS
Texas A&M Research Leadrship Programs: https://aggieresearch.tamu.edu/research-leadership
BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Christopher Quick is a Professor of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology. Since joining Texas A&M in 2002, he has been on the forefront of creating inclusive models for education, research and service, as well as administrative models to support sustainable, scalable, and inclusive curricular and co-curricular undergraduate education and research leadership programs. To achieve goals of the Quality Enhancement Plan, in 2016 he created the undergraduate Biomedical Research Certificate (BRC) Program and the Aggie Research Program (ARP). To increase scalability, he designed BRC and ARP to accommodate multiple tracks to retain pedagogical rigor while capturing administrative efficiencies of scale. Partnering with centers and institutes, he has created multiple research leadership programs and spearheaded NIH-funded programs to prepare graduate students to lead research teams and teach course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), as well as train postdoctoral scholars to create, evaluate, expand, and direct their own research leadership programs. Under his guidance, these interdisciplinary programs have grown 30% a year to serve 1,200 students/year (as of 2021), 41% of which are underrepresented in STEM. The ARP and BRC together create more than half of all research opportunities for freshman and sophomores at TAMU and have recently become the largest undergraduate research program in the nation. He has been awarded a university-level Association of Former Students Award for Teaching Excellence as well as a University Professorship in Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. In his capacity as Executive Director of the Aggie Research Program, he continues to eliminate barriers so students can leverage their unique strengths to create research and leadership opportunities for fellow students. Dr. Quick is an ADHD professor who had struggled to learn in traditional lecture classes, failed to meet the standards to join an undergraduate research program, and was advised to discontinue seeking leadership opportunities that leverage his strengths and instead seek remediation for his deficits. After missing a deadline to drop out of school, he took the opportunity to challenge the proposition that he was the problem that needed to be fixed.