Getbio-PGR: The Gateway for Education, Training, Broader Impacts and Outreach in Plant Genome Research

Education, training, collaboration, broadening participation as well as raising awareness of the role that plant science plays in the quality of everyday life have remained important goals in the development of the National Plant Genome Initiative (NPGI) 2014-2018 five year plan and goals related to the NSF Plant Genome Research Program specifically. Broader impacts (BI) are of great importance but also pose many challenges to those seeking opportunities as well as for researchers planning and implementing programs, such as: 1) finding and sharing resources (funding, infrastructure and personnel); 2) locating and collating information that is diverse, widespread and presented in a variety of ways; 3) lack of technical expertise and infrastructure for creating websites, videos, integrating applications such as social media, survey tools and analytic tools; 4) disseminating information and interacting with large, distributed groups; 5) meeting recruitment initiative goals to broaden participation and building collaborations in unfamiliar communities; 6) measuring success and promoting and highlighting successful projects; and 7) learning how to locate, organize and use bioinformatics instructional materials and analytic tools in the sea of existing distributed, abundant, and diverse bioinformatics resources. The primary objective of this project is to create a Gateway for Education, Training, Broader Impacts and Outreach in Plant Genome Research (GETBIO-PGR) that will provide an infrastructure for researchers, educators, students and the general public to access, create, share and exchange information about plant genome research projects’ broader impact activities and also provide a resource to enable users to discover requisite bioinformatics analytic tools.