PLoS Computational Biology (Mar 2018)

Meet-U: Educating through research immersion.

  • Nika Abdollahi,
  • Alexandre Albani,
  • Eric Anthony,
  • Agnes Baud,
  • Mélissa Cardon,
  • Robert Clerc,
  • Dariusz Czernecki,
  • Romain Conte,
  • Laurent David,
  • Agathe Delaune,
  • Samia Djerroud,
  • Pauline Fourgoux,
  • Nadège Guiglielmoni,
  • Jeanne Laurentie,
  • Nathalie Lehmann,
  • Camille Lochard,
  • Rémi Montagne,
  • Vasiliki Myrodia,
  • Vaitea Opuu,
  • Elise Parey,
  • Lélia Polit,
  • Sylvain Privé,
  • Chloé Quignot,
  • Maria Ruiz-Cuevas,
  • Mariam Sissoko,
  • Nicolas Sompairac,
  • Audrey Vallerix,
  • Violaine Verrecchia,
  • Marc Delarue,
  • Raphael Guérois,
  • Yann Ponty,
  • Sophie Sacquin-Mora,
  • Alessandra Carbone,
  • Christine Froidevaux,
  • Stéphane Le Crom,
  • Olivier Lespinet,
  • Martin Weigt,
  • Samer Abboud,
  • Juliana Bernardes,
  • Guillaume Bouvier,
  • Chloé Dequeker,
  • Arnaud Ferré,
  • Patrick Fuchs,
  • Gaëlle Lelandais,
  • Pierre Poulain,
  • Hugues Richard,
  • Hugo Schweke,
  • Elodie Laine,
  • Anne Lopes

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005992
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 3
p. e1005992

Abstract

Read online

We present a new educational initiative called Meet-U that aims to train students for collaborative work in computational biology and to bridge the gap between education and research. Meet-U mimics the setup of collaborative research projects and takes advantage of the most popular tools for collaborative work and of cloud computing. Students are grouped in teams of 4-5 people and have to realize a project from A to Z that answers a challenging question in biology. Meet-U promotes "coopetition," as the students collaborate within and across the teams and are also in competition with each other to develop the best final product. Meet-U fosters interactions between different actors of education and research through the organization of a meeting day, open to everyone, where the students present their work to a jury of researchers and jury members give research seminars. This very unique combination of education and research is strongly motivating for the students and provides a formidable opportunity for a scientific community to unite and increase its visibility. We report on our experience with Meet-U in two French universities with master's students in bioinformatics and modeling, with protein-protein docking as the subject of the course. Meet-U is easy to implement and can be straightforwardly transferred to other fields and/or universities. All the information and data are available at www.meet-u.org.