Education
Progress Reports
2009
Four US students and their US advisors Dr. Jurgen Theiss, Dr. Javier Zavala-Garay, and Robert Thombley were hosted by the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) in Zanzibar during July and August 2009. The students summarized their work and results in a progress report.
2008
Dr. Javier Zavala-Garay at Rutgers University, USA, hosted Shigalla Mahongo of the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute (TAFIRI) for one month in July and August 2008 to provide Mr. Mahongo with basic training in coastal modeling using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) as well as special training on a ROMS model of the Zanzibar Channel. Mr. Mahongo was supported by a POGO-SCOR Fellowship (Grants and Contributions).
2007
Dr. Jurgen Theiss at Theiss Research, USA, hosted Gabriela Mayorga-Adame for two weeks in April 2007 to prepare her for the scientific and cultural challenges of her subsequent three-month visit to the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) in Zanzibar. At IMS in Zanzibar, Mrs. Mayorga-Adame was supervised by Dr. Alfonse Dubi and Dr. Yohanna Shaghude, and remotely by Dr. Javier Zavala-Garay.
Originally Proposed Education
The Zanzibar Project from 2009 to 2011 is entirely funded by the NSF/OISE IRES grant (Grants and Contributions) in order to give undergraduate and graduate students in the US (below referred to as 'students') an international research experience. The following are extracts, slightly revised, from the original proposal of February 2008 that lead to this grant (Original proposal - project summary and description only). The actual education might somewhat differ from and hopefully surpass the education that was originally proposed.
Continuous Preparation
It is key to select the students early to allow for a long preparation time and to fully integrate them into the network of people associated with the project. Besides the obvious advantage of giving the students sufficient time and assistance to prepare since they will already be very occupied with their current studies and research, it will also instill in them the feeling of being an integral part of a bigger effort. The advantage of this is that they will become more dedicated. This is one of the essential lessons Dr. Theiss learned over the past 12 years of sending German undergraduate physics students to study in Nairobi, Kenya for a full academic year through the Berlin-Nairobi Exchange.
Dr. Theiss will spend a substantial amount of time regularly communicating with the students about everything ranging from practical to cultural and scientific matters and facilitating the communication between the students and others who can help prepare them, including the many advisors and supporters that have already contributed to the Zanzibar Project, former student participants of the Berlin-Nairobi Exchange, and those who are involved in other NSF International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) projects with Africa.
The preparation time will especially allow to ensure that the students' projects are designed such that they become an integral part of the students' US academic programs and that the students are fully supported by their advisors. Two institutions in particular, the Oregon State University and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), are officially offering to work with their students and the Dr. Theiss to ensure such an integration.
Dr. Theiss will hire a student to assist him with the project management. If one of the participating students is at UCSD or any other institution in the San Diego area, where Dr. Theiss is based, he would hire this student as his assistant. This participating student would then have the additional benefit of learning more about the organizational aspects of the Zanzibar Project.
Preparation Meeting
The continuous preparation described above will be complemented by a 4-day meeting in La Jolla, CA, where Dr. Theiss is based. This meeting each year will bring together the participating students, Dr. Javier Zavala-Garay, a physical oceanographer at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, who will be with the students at IMS in Zanzibar and supervise their projects, Robert Thombley, a technician at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), who will be at IMS in Zanzibar in the first year to help set up and use the oceanographic instruments that will be taken to Zanzibar for the first time, and Dr.\ Sharon Franks, an educational program specialist at SIO, who will advise and assess the students and be in general responsible for the evaluation of the Zanzibar Project. In the first year, Gabriela Mayorga-Adame, who carried out a student project within the Zanzibar Project at IMS in Zanzibar in the summer of 2007, will also participate. Besides these committed participants, others might join the meeting. For example, several SIO students and faculty members have offered Dr. Theiss to give presentations. Dr. Brian Arbic, a physical oceanographer at the University of Texas, has offered to participate at no cost to the proposed project to speak about his three years as a United States Peace Corp volunteer in West Africa.
The meeting will consist of presentations and discussions addressing all practical, cultural, and scientific issues and of sessions in which the committed participants discuss their individual expectations and objectives and then, as a group, formulate a concrete common agenda for the time at IMS in Zanzibar. The purpose of the meeting is therefore to draw together the results from all the discussions that will have taken place prior to the meeting, as described above. By actively contributing to the development of an overall agenda for the time in Zanzibar the students will have formulated goals for themselves and thus be far more motivated to pursue these goals than if they would just be assign a pre-defined project. The process of collectively developing an agenda will also promote team building among all committed participants.
Zanzibar
At the IMS in Zanzibar, comprehensive mentoring of the students will be crucial to their success and the success of the entire proposed project. It will primarily be provided by local senior scientists and Dr. Javier Zavala-Garay, a physical oceanographer at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, who will be with the students in Zanzibar. Further mentoring will be provided up on demand by the advisors and supporters that have already contributed to the Zanzibar Project, which Dr. Theiss will co-ordinate. In particular, support will be provided by Professor Chris Reason at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who has developed a ROMS model of the Western Indian ocean and Robert Thombley at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who will set up the oceanographic instruments. Both will be visiting IMS in Zanzibar in the first year.
Local senior scientists at IMS in Zanzibar will be dedicated to providing the best support to the students because coastal modeling is one of their top priorities. The extraordinary commitment IMS in Zanzibar is willing to make is represented in the fact that Dr. Alfonse Dubi, the Director of IMS in Zanzibar, personally supervised Gabriela Mayorga-Adame in the summer of 2007. Dr. Yohanna Shaghude, a senior scientist at IMS in Zanzibar, is also already involved and helped Dr. Theiss devise the data projects.
Dr. Zavala Garay will be with the students at IMS. He is using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), which will be used in the Zanzibar Project, in his own research. Besides his expertise on ROMS applications he is already intimately familiar with the ROMS application of the Zanzibar Channel developed by Gabriela Mayorga-Adame because he advised her remotely while she was at IMS in Zanzibar. He also trained a visiting scientist from Mexico on ROMS and is offering the same training to IMS scientists, which would contribute to capacity development at IMS in Zanzibar. Dr. Zavala-Garay has also extensive experience in oceanographic campaigns, mainly in the acquisition of hydrographic data using a CTD. He has participated in several oceanographic cruises in the Gulf of California with research institutes from Mexico, the "Joint Air-Sea Monsoon Interaction Experiment (42 days in east Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal, 1999), and the North American Monsoon Experiment (Gulf of California, summer 2004). Dr. Zavala-Garay's past research and educational work will make him an ideal advisor to the participating students.
Professor Chris Reason, will help guide the model projects, especially because his and Dr. Juliet Hermes' ROMS model of the tropical Western Indian Ocean (Hermes and Reason, 2008) will be studied and possibly re-configured and re-run by the students. Professor Reason will therefore visit IMS in Zanzibar in the first year. Because two IMS scientists are currently taking the Master's course on Applied Marine Science in Professor Reason's department, Professor Reason suggested that their theses could be contributions to the proposed project and his visit to Zanzibar will help bring these various efforts together. Professor Reason has a unique perspective on Africa, having supervised many African students including two Tanzanian Master students (Kijazi, 2003; Ngwali, 2007), who now work at the Tanzania Meteorological Agency, and he is also the co-Chair of CLIVAR Africa.
Robert Thombley, a technician at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), who will visit IMS in the first year to supervise the use of the instruments on loan from SIO, will also teach the students about the instruments.
Besides these close advisors, the students will be actively encouraged during the preparation phase to approach also other experts that can give advice. Beyond IMS, the PI has already established contacts to other local institutions (section~\ref{Research-Context}).
Each summer undergraduate students from the University of Dar es Salaam come to IMS in Zanzibar to carry out research internships as part of their studies. The PI cannot guarantee that they will be sufficiently qualified to play a minor role in the data projects but they will certainly be fully involved in the data projects, thus building possibly long-lasting relations to the US students.
Continued Involvement
The interdependence of the individual student research projects, not only of one year but also between different years, the team building effort, and the integration of the students' projects into the students' US academic programs will encourage the students to remain involved for the remainder of the proposed project. More generally, the proposed project offers research experiences in a different environment and context than their research experience at home. This will allow the students to envision additional career paths and thus motivate them to remain engaged in science.
Evaluation
Three evaluation questions, aligned with the educational goals of the project, will guide the evalution:
1) To what extent does participation in this research experience impact students' attitudes and motivation with respect to collaborative, international research?2) What educational gains are made by the students in terms of increased content knowledge and improved interpersonal and communication skills?
3) How relevant and useful is the experience in terms of the students' progress and ultimate completion of the US academic programs in which they are enrolled?
Formative and summative evaluation conducted during and after the preparation and experiential stages of the project will yield qualitative and quantitative data about educational impact of students' international research experiences. The project team will collaboratively develop evaluation instruments including semi-structured interviews and simple surveys designed to document changes in students' awareness, understanding, and attitudes as a result of their experiences. Informal communications amongst students, the PI and the on-site mentor Dr. Javier Zavala-Garay will provide valuable supplementary information. Funds have been requested in a separate proposal to support the involvement of Dr. Sharon Franks to serve as an external evaluator in overseeing the development and administration of the evaluation instruments, as well as analysis, interpretation and reporting of the data collected.