May 28th marked the beginning of two of Lehigh’s research-related summer programs. For its inaugural summer session, Lehigh’s Research Translation AcceLUrator (RTA) welcomed students to an orientation led by Dr. Neal Simon and Dr. Vassie Ware of Lehigh’s Biological Sciences Department. Alongside other students from the Science Technology Engineering and Math Summer Institute (STEM-SI), interns learned more about their responsibilities and their specific team’s goal before embarking upon their 10-week internship.
The orientation covered the rough timeline of the entire internship, including a highlight on “Research Day,” the day each team from STEM-SI and RTA would convene together to pitch their progress and innovation over the whole program. Orientation also provided opportunities to interact with fellow interns, even if they wouldn't be working in the same team as you, and there were many discussions about the difficulty of ethics, research, and using research properly to impact society positively.
Within the training session, there was an emphasis on the connections and opportunities available outside of the expected day-to-day happenings, via meetings and checkups with professors, opportunities to learn more about academia and entrepreneurship, both on Lehigh’s campus and remotely.
Both Professor Simon and Professor Ware emphasized independence, initiative, and the boldness required to express oneself and fight for what one has worked for. These ideals, combined with RTA’s initiative to help not only these summer interns, but the whole school take research beyond the lab into the real world, are something very important for Lehigh’s vision of innovation and entrepreneurship.
The orientation led to an introduction of RTA by the Associate Vice Provost for Research Translation, and the Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Accelerated Research Translation grant, Professor John Coulter of Lehigh University. He presented the importance of RTA’s goal of being a bridge from academia to the industry and being a program that focuses on creating and assisting innovations that will impact not only the University, but the world.
Professor Coulter brought up examples of projects, including educational innovations, such as a project to help people with ADHD be able to thrive and reach their full potential despite their disability, and a project for more efficient power sources, such as a cleaner iteration of a wastewater plant.
His expression of RTA assisting not only the RTA research but also the STEM-SI research that the majority of interns in the room would be working on was effective. Encouraging all the students who ranged from undergraduates, graduate students, and even students who weren’t part of Lehigh, to consider how their work will impact the world.
This is one of RTA’s main goals, making sure that their initiative expands past the scope of college research and helps change the world for the better while helping all these promising professionals.