Founded in 1848, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is the largest general scientific society in the world. The organization engages in a range of science-related activities, including the publication of the peer-reviewed journal Science, which boasts an estimated readership of around one million. This report, which is available for free PDF download, outlines the AAAS’s suggestions for jump-starting undergraduate biology education. The ideas focus on cultivating biological literacy, a student-centered approach to the curriculum, what the process of preparing campuses for upcoming challenges will entail, and the unity of purpose that will be necessary to accomplish the next steps in creating excellent undergraduate biology education. Originally published in 2009, the report still rings true today.

Community College instructors with an interest in the commercial applications of Bioscience will find much to admire in the Bioscience Industrial Fellowship Project (BIFP). This National Science Foundation-sponsored professional development opportunity provides fellowships for ten high-impact instructors from anywhere in the country to come to North Carolina for a month of training in June 2015. During that time, BIFP fellows will engage in boot camps at three community colleges around the state, in which they will gain hands-on lab experience. They will also shadow workers in twelve different industrial/university hosting facilities. For more information, interested instructors may click here for a six minute video overview of the program. Applications can be found here.

Community colleges have been using multiple federal grants to build programs for many years. But collaborative efforts between five ATE centers and the Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grants are a fresh approach with big implications for both programs. The Community College Daily and American Association of Community Colleges published an article discussing the partnership. For the article click here.

Congress has approved the 2015 NSF budget - a $7.344 billion allotment which represents a 2.4% increase over 2014 monies. Jeffrey Mervis provides a good overview in his recent article on the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Magazine website. Of particular interest to the ATE community, the NSF's educational directorate came away with approximately an extra $20 million, to be spent on undergraduate STEM programs and an overhaul of science-oriented graduate programs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' report, Women in the Labor Force: A Datebook, which was published in December 2014, is now available here. The report covers such areas as demographic characteristics, educational attainment, occupation and industry, earnings, hours of work, and other interesting comparisons of women in the workforce in 2013 compared to previous years. For ATE projects and centers interested in drawing in more women, the National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology, and Science is always a useful resource.

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Community College enrollment has dipped slightly in recent years, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. It can be interesting, then, to note which schools are bucking the trends. This report from Community College Week lists the fastest growing community colleges in the country in four enrollment categories, including schools with an enrollment under 2,500 students, schools with an enrollment between 2,500 and 4,999 students, schools that enroll between 5,000 and 9,999 students, and those community colleges that enroll more than 10,000 students.

Join Nancy Maron, Program Director of Sustainability and Scholarly Communications at ITHAKA S&R, and Edward Almasy, Director and Co-PI of ATE Central, for the first webinar in our spring series: Planning, Goal Setting, and Follow-Through. As we all know, planning and goal setting in terms of grant funded projects may seem obvious: the terms of the grant spell out the aims of the work and its need, the timings and budget. Still, for multi-year grants or projects that are moving into the post-grant phase, setting achievable goals that address both the short and very long term ambitions of the initiative is harder than it looks. Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2014, 2pm eastern Length: 90 minutes Sign Up: http://www.matecnetworks.org/webreg/ate_central.php For more information on this webinar and others in the series, click here

Many ATE projects and centers rely on the web to disseminate the resources they create, though not all have the infrastructure necessary to sustain online access to these resources over time. In order to preserve the resources created by ATE awardees -- thereby broadening the impact and reach of the ATE community as a whole -- ATE Central offers a digital archiving service that is designed to provide access to these valuable materials beyond the lives of those projects and centers that created them. Come learn about the ATE Central archiving requirement, discuss strategies, and work through a basic archiving checklist! Join us at the 2014 ATE PI Conference in Washington, DC: Date: Thursday, October 23, 2014 Time: 2:30pm - 3:45pm Location: Ambassador, Omni Shoreham Hotel