Course Overview

The course aims to provide both conceptual and hands-on training in socially impactful academic research, with an emphasis on connectional (lab-to-world) research. Through targeted exercises, individual and team tasks, and lectures, students will be exposed to many concepts in lab knowledge inventory, ideation and idea refinement, 2 compelling communication, ethnographic research of stakeholders, and training on policy development, education program creation, services, or products as ways of connecting lab knowledge to the outside world. At the end of the project, the students will each have a complete proposal ready to for a connectional research project of 2-3 year duration, with a plan for testing their proposed approach against current standards.

Course Description

You have worked in a lab for at least a year (Masters level training can count IF you are planning to transfer to PhD), and you want to extend your impact to the outside world. Through individual and team tasks, you will develop a full proposal that, when executed, will mean an effective attempt at connecting a development—a technique, tool, or discovery—from your lab to the world. The proposal will be empirically-focused, with a goal of defining testable questions and hypotheses about your connectional idea.

But effective connectional research—generating and testing hypotheses about how to connect lab knowledge to the world—requires far more than a proposal. It requires development of creative thinking skill to enable a reimagination of what your lab work means. Compelling communication demands being able to convey ideas simply and persuasively, and testing them for these qualities to filter the good ideas out of the unworkable ones. Crucially, getting things from the lab out to the world requires a much greater appreciation for what the “world” wants— analyzing and understanding demands of specific stakeholders, preparing effective communication targeted to this group, and getting partners and collaborators to “buy-in” to your idea.

These are the ambitious goals of this course: to teach and practice creative re-thinking; to energize innovative problem solving; to enable persuasive communication; to foster an understanding of groups and stakeholders and their problems; to identify and engage partners and collaborators; all in service of planning an effective connection of a technique, tool, or discovery from the lab to the world.

Instructional Method

The course will be largely based on lab work, but will include lectures, individual and team exercises, as well as many meetings with potential partners and collaborators.

The entire philosophy for the course is through concept learning and verifying learning through “concept play”— which involves running a lot of little experiments, some being as simple as “I wonder if these people will care about my idea”. A first step is to actually catalog all the concepts in a lab and rate how well you think you know the concept (can you talk about it? If not, you don’t know it!). You will enlist the help of your lab mates and even your PI.

Evaluation

30% of your grade will come from class participation, including participation in the blind peer-review system. 20% of your grade will come from your effort and advancement on your class assignments (again, judged on peer-review and instructor evaluations). 50% of your grade will depend on your final full proposal.