Improving Scientific Efficiency in Undergraduate Research Laboratories

Increased communication and collaboration could improve undergraduate research. Image by i a walsh

Increased communication and collaboration could improve undergraduate research. Image by i a walsh

In depictions of the founding age of science, such as that of Dr. Frankenstein, we always see the lone scientist working in his laboratory with his books and tools being his only companion. But in this era of complex science, lone wolfs are going extinct and collaborative teams are becoming more prevalent. Scientific collaboration is becoming of increasing interest to the science community because of its positive impact on the quality of research and publications. Our era has seen incredibly positive results on collaborations, and this has made scientists, scholars, organizations and policy makers begin to embrace it as an integral part of the research process. When we meticulously look at fields that have been highly successful, fields such as HIV research and genome sequencing, we find that their success can be attributed to an increase in international and interdisciplinary collaboration. For example in the field of HIV research, academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, and research labs all bring together ideas on how to eradicate the disease. Their accomplishments are something that no single laboratory could have ever done on its own. By working together and sharing available resources, investigators now have access to technologies, funds, and ideas. This collaboration has accelerated the work on eradicating HIV. Our belief is that, as we grow in our knowledge of science, we also develop more efficient ways to get to these results and elucidations.

However, efficiency is a term freely thrown around and consequently has major misconceptions tied to it. Everyone has fallen into that misguided hole where they associate a word with its societal connotation. Thanks to the fads of society, when we think of efficiency, we envision a system that minimizes how much waste is produced. We think of ways to use less energy to prevent resource depletion and preserve the environment. Due to this whim, whenever we inevitably think of efficiency in scientific research, we end up brainstorming ways to conserve energy. Conservation of resources is not the same as efficiently maximizing those resources. Conservation is reducing the total amount of energy consumption, while efficiency is conserving energy but still keeping the same quality of products and services.

If we look back to the roots of research and the triumphs we have achieved, we will find residual factors such as collaboration to be the key to research efficiency. Collaboration should be of foremost importance in the eradication of research inadequacies because unlike energy that inevitably must be wasted in some form or amount, collaboration is a factor that can easily be attained and managed.

To tackle inefficiency in science, we need to focus on undergraduate research labs because numerous breakthroughs in science can be dated back to them. A good example of a breakthrough made at the undergraduate level is the discovery of the Arabinose operon. Englesberg described in his article how this discovery was made through initially working on these genes in a summer laboratory course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This exemplifies that curious inquisitions at the undergraduate level could be a key to the future of science, but the inefficiency in the overall system prevents the scientific community from maximizing the potential of these institutions.

Increasing communication and cooperation between laboratories studying the same things at the undergraduate level with those at much larger research institutions can prove beneficial. The research conducted on common issues in these labs, as in the case of HIV, may thrive from this enhanced communication. While the scientific community has been collaborative, the level of collaboration has not permeated all aspects of research in favor of a far more competitive atmosphere. Collaboration at the undergraduate level should be encouraged because it can lead to the increased flow and availability of ideas, resources, and methods. This sharing of resources will save both time and cost, something that undergraduate institutions are considerably lacking when compared with larger counterparts. This idea of division of labor should not only be encouraged but should also be embedded in undergraduate programs. Promoting an atmosphere of collaboration at this early stage would ensure that the future of science moves toward a more collaborative and efficient era.

I see undergraduate institutions embracing this art of cooperation in their programs through laboratory courses. Instead of just forming groups that carry out specified experiments, discussions should take place between the students as a whole before and after the experiment. This will foster the flow of ideas, and might bring up new perspectives and approaches to a research question. Apart from discussions in these classrooms, research professors should employ more students in their labs and divide up the work towards a specific goal. Employing more students in a research lab could increase the population of future scientists since undergraduate research can spark research interests in individuals.

What also needs to be promoted is a means of enhancing this communication efficiently, especially among the professors at undergraduate institutions. The competition for grants at the undergraduate level is on a lab-by-lab basis, even for undergraduate research fellowships. The atmosphere in these institutions has become one of mere competition for a smaller pot of money. The result is overlap in areas of research that are not as effective as a collaborative effort. It would be better to fund multi-lab projects across undergraduate institutions, in a similar process as that recently employed by large research institutions. Several institutions can work on common research topics with a central pool of money, coordinating and sharing information and methodology.

Another way to eradicate inefficiency in scientific labs is to enhance the sharing of ideas between undergraduate researchers. We should be making research more readily available, for example, with search engines and journals. We should also be making undergraduate research more accessible and obtainable publicly without any institutional inhibitions or claim. Undergraduate research relies on public scientific platforms that are coming from higher level research communities, but most undergraduate research publications are lost and dwarfed within these established research podia. To eliminate the entrapment of undergraduate projects, such research should have a separate forum for growth. This self-segregation in addition to cooperation will enable undergraduates to uplift their own research topics to a level where they can stand beside other reputable research communities in the future.

Interdepartmental and interinstitutional competition are major flaws in the research process at undergraduate institutions. We need to start at ground level and come up with symposia that discuss ways to maximize cooperation in undergraduate laboratories. Understandably, such division of labor is not intrinsic to how professors currently teach, so if we are to move forward with this idea, there has to be some brainstorming among undergraduate research professors about best practices for multi-lab projects across institutions. This new way of approaching research at the undergraduate level needs conversations on how to increase communication and collaboration. It is time for us take up the challenge toward improving the future of research.

This essay won second prize in COMPASS’s 2015 Writing Contest

About the Author:


Chiamaka Okorie is an undergraduate at SUNY Geneseo.
Christina Szalinski is a science writer with a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.