Undergraduate research

Biomedical and basic biological research are now probably better funded than physics and chemistry. Moreover, biological research has proven that it can have a direct impact on public health and economic development, with the result that the prospects for the life sciences are apparently better than ever. But this success creates its own problem: the demand for talented researchers is quickly outpacing supply. This trend has worried many policy makers, scientists, educators and politicians, and has encouraged them to find new ways to attract young students into research.> …for research, you need an individual experience, and that's enormously time and resource expensiveAs disciplines, biology and medicine are actually faring better than chemistry and physics, which have suffered from a spate of university department closures in recent years. Even so, there is a continuing failure to attract sufficient numbers of gifted students to all scientific disciplines. The USA was the first to recognize that this problem begins at the undergraduate level, and to identify a solution to actively recruit students to the sciences and retain them at the graduate level. The US analysis proposed that students were losing interest in their subjects because of a lack of engagement with genuine research, and that they would be more likely to continue to postgraduate level and beyond if they were engaged in real, front‐line research, rather than just conventional coursework (Russell et al , 2006). Both the US federal government and many individual universities created several schemes, which resulted in the US National Science Foundation (NSF; Arlington, VA) revising its grant conditions in order to encourage undergraduate research in 2001.Most European countries have come to similar conclusions about the importance of undergraduate research, but have yet to incorporate this into funding and policy decisions. “In the USA, the NSF almost expects that …