Assistant Professor Utah Valley University Salt Lake City, Utah
We often find ourselves with students interested in developing research skills and experience, but have limited access to research funding and relevant equipment. While funding is limited, we can take advantage of the wealth of information published over the decades in journals, textbooks, and proceedings. Students can take advantage of online searches, libraries, and interlibrary loans to mine data and synthesize their own datasets for creating publicly available databases and novel analyses. Students can gain valuable skills in literature review, data formatting, coding languages, and bioinformatic analyses, all without a cost to the student or research lab. Here I will highlight my efforts, and those of others, to aid students in producing valuable undergraduate research experiences at a low cost. I will discuss undergraduate-driven research projects currently taking place in my lab, as well as information about the newly available Diptera and Drosophila karyotype database.
