Duke graduate students Eleanor Caves (Biology), Joyell Arscott (Nursing) and Zachary Carico (Immunology) are this year’s student recipients of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring.
Caves (pictured above) is part of a graduate student group that received a Duke Support for Interdisciplinary Graduate Networks (D-SIGN) grant for the 2016-2017 academic year. Her successful proposal, submitted with Rebecca Lauzon, Ph.D. student in Earth and Ocean Sciences, and Patrick Green, Ph.D. student in Biology, called for a new network of STEM graduate students and Master of Arts in Teaching students to create lesson plans based on current research and distribute them to local K-12 educators. The network utilizes the structure of a graduate student-run STEM outreach group called the Scientific Research and Education Network (SciREN), which develops relationships between researchers and educators to incorporate current research into K-12 classrooms. All lesson plans created for SciREN are freely available to educators through an online repository. The group’s faculty sponsors are Kate Allman and Brad Murray.