Friends, I'm Milind.
I come from India,
and I worked as an undergraduate teacher
almost throughout my life,
and I loved that,
and I'm going to relate to you a story
of doing science with undergraduates.
The story began as a fun,
and developed into serious science outcomes,
serious research outcomes.
I call the story a 'katta' story or a 'katta' model.
Katta, in my language, Marathi,
means "a place to sit and chat".
It could be a roadside or a garden or a platform
on which people come and sit and chat.
So, we treated science as a chat.
For a long time,
this experiment was done over a span of almost twenty years,
and, throughout,
we treated science in an upside-down way.
Generally, people think that undergraduate years
are preparative years,
and students learn their basic science there,
and then they become eligible to research.
Well, this is fine.
We looked at it in an upside-down manner.
We used research as a tool in education,
and the meaning of research is simple:
you ask your own questions,
and try to design experiments,
and try to get answers
to your own questions.
So, undergraduates are at the center
of this model,
and this is substantially different from involving undergraduates
in a running lab.
In most places, labs have a focus,
they have a running research program,
and undergraduates come and participate in that
as summer trainees,
as their semester project,
as their credits and so on,
while this differs from that in the sense that
it begins with undergraduate ideas.
It begins with their thinking.
It's their questions, their experimental designs.
And then there is one or more mentors
that try to navigate them if they are going wrong,
stimulate them to think better,
and help them in some analysis,
in some statistics,
in writing up,
and so on.
So, it is essentially undergraduate creativity
that is at the center of this
and, because they ask a variety of questions,
you can venture into new questions
which are essentially new areas of science.
So, the thinking,
which is very different,
uninhibited,
lateral thinking,
they ask crazy questions...
and therefore you can go into
a wide variety of fields of science
and also pioneer novel concepts.
This becomes possible
because undergraduates have a high risk tolerance.
A PhD student typically is a little business-minded
in the sense that the degree is important,
and the degree needs to come
at the end of whatever... five years of hard work.
You can't say I've failed
at the end of five years,
so you need to being with something
where you know you will get results.
Undergraduates do not have this limitation.
They can start working on things
and, if it fails, it fails.
They have nothing to lose.
They are getting their degree anyway.
But if it clicks, it can click in a big way,
because they are asking new questions,
they are doing very different things.
So, central to this model
is coming together once in a week
for, say, about an hour or two,
or sometimes unlimited,
it can go on for several hours.
But there is no pre-decided speaker.
This is not a journal club.
This is not where people present papers.
This is just a chat,
so there is no pre-decided focus.
We might start with physics,
we might end up with human behavior,
and nobody prevents...
nobody says that this is not the subject
that we are discussing today.
So, there is random branching
and drifting discussion,
which churns out a large number of ideas,
and when you have churned out a large number of ideas,
then it is left for them to take a shape.
So, I call that natural selection.
So, if some idea is attractive,
some students say that,
"Oh, I find it interesting.
Let me work on it."
So, a number of projects begin,
but behind all these projects
is questioning.
Okay?
I look at this as a factory of skeptics
where they question,
they cross-question,
they challenge things from textbooks,
and that is where the whole thing begins.
But being a skeptic is not the end of it,
this is just the beginning,
because once you ask questions
then you have a responsibility,
and if you feel the responsibility
you will try to design experiments.
So, a number of projects take shape,
and then students are free
to pick up any of the projects voluntarily.
They are also free to give it up if they feel like.
There are no credits, grades,
no formal academic advantage associated with it,
so those who work work only out of interest.
And then all outcomes
come back to katta
and they are discussed in katta once again.
Some of them we feel that are good and publishable.
Some students have ended up patenting their ideas,
and presenting at conferences.
And the spectrum of such publishable work
has been pretty wide. Okay?
Everything here is from a single group
and was done by undergraduates.
We have things that range
from microbiology, ecology,
evolutionary biology, animal cognition,
human behavior, psychology,
sex and mating systems,
game theory...
and everything done by a group of undergraduates
with one of two teachers helping them.
In terms of tool-sets used,
also, they are equally diverse.
Okay?
So, we have used theoretical modeling,
simulation, meta-analysis,
synthesis,
mainly because this doesn't need any HiFi lab.
Okay?
This is simply thinking;
access to a computer,
and some library is enough.
Then there are field oriented studies,
which relate to animal behavior,
relate to plant behavior,
simple wildlife ecology...
Then there are human experiments,
which range from questionnaire surveys
to behavioral experiments.
Then there are wet-lab experiments,
but simple wet-lab experiments
which an undergraduate lab can easily do.
It doesn't involve
very sophisticated instrumentation in the lab,
but the questions asked are new,
so even these simple wet-lab experiments
can give us something new.
And some students have designed
new products,
simple things, simple devices in the lab
or simple devices in the kitchen,
and often patented them.
There are limitations of undergraduate research,
no doubt.
The most important thing is,
because of the tight limitations of time
as well as lab facilities,
they are unable to build a large volume of work,
so whenever we think of publishing,
we have to sell our research
based on the novelty rather than the volume and rigor of work.
Then, the funding facilities are limited.
Writing is a major bottleneck,
because undergraduates can think...
their thinking is crude, but useful...
they can work,
they can devote much time, energy, and effort,
but they are not mature enough to write,
so their mentors have to come
and help them in writing...
whatever, a patent draft, a paper,
a poster, or whatever.
Access to literature has been a problem for a long time,
but it is now getting resolved
because there are so many online sources.
Who were the people,
who were the students who ended up publishing
in reputed journals?
They were not necessarily
the students with academic excellence.
Often, they were near drop-outs.
So, it is independent of this axis.
It is also independent
of the family backgrounds
from which they come,
so some of them have come
from poor and even uneducated families,
while some of them have come from elite families.
Then, it also seems to be independent
of their street smartness,
because some of them who were shy
and found it difficult to express themselves.
Others were both and brilliant.
So, it seems to be independent of this.
Then, what was common in them?
So, I could say that there are three qualities.
All of them had an open frame of mind.
They were open to ideas,
they were receptive,
and they were communicative,
they had high levels of motivation and excitement
about what they were doing,
and a high level of involvement
in whatever they did and thought.
To give you a couple of examples,
I will relate one story
to illustrate how the thinking goes,
and how it develops.
In one of these sessions,
in one of the kattas,
a student suddenly had an idea that...
we were talking about pollinators,
and pollinators is a mutualism.
So, the plant produce nectar for the pollinators,
and the pollinators in turn help the plant
by pollinating.
Is it possible for the flowers to cheat the pollinators
by not making nectar?
Well, this came up as a question,
and it looked logical
because pollinators have no way to know
whether there is nectar before entering the flower,
and therefore the flowers could cheat.
This clicked, and some students,
a small group of students,
said, "Let us go out and try it out".
So, then they had to find ways
of measuring sugar in nectar in flowers,
and then they actually went and sampled
some 28 species of different flowers,
and then they come up saying that,
yes, you do see empty flowers,
which means that they were cheating.
And I said, "No.
Also think of alternatives.
It may not be cheating.
The empty flowers might be giving certain other advantages.
So, look at other possibilities of empty flowers."
Then, we came up with half a dozen different
possible explanations for empty flowers,
and then the question was how to resolve
between these alternative hypotheses.
This is the way the thinking goes.
Then, ultimately, we came up with a way of
differentiating between the hypotheses.
So, what you see here is that
there are number of different hypotheses
which possibly explain empty flowers,
and then all of them make predictions.
And then you have a series of predictions,
and each hypothesis makes
a different set of predictions,
so then you can go to real-life data,
look at which predictions match,
and then ultimately we decided that
the cheating hypothesis stood the test,
and the alternative hypotheses were rejected.
So, if you agree that flowers cheat,
and some of the flowers don't make nectar,
they question is:
what proportion of flowers should make nectar,
and what proportion of flowers should be empty?
There should be some optimization of that,
and the optimization is a mathematical problem.
So, a group of mathematically oriented students
took it as a challenge,
and they developed mathematical models for it.
In fact, we published two papers
on optimization of nectar.
The problem is complex
because it is not only optimizing
on how much nectar should be produced.
There is a cost of display,
of the color and fragrance.
There is a cost of nectar.
And then, how much should be invested in the display,
how much should be invested in the cost?
Can I invest in one and not invest in the other?
This is a complex problem,
but we had good solutions
that ended up in two research papers.
Well, let me also relate some other questions,
some other perhaps crazy-looking questions
that we tackled.
So, for example,
whether birds understand geometry,
or whether birds have a concept of triangles.
Whether birds have theory of mind,
which is a kind of psychological ability,
a mental ability that humans have,
but whether other animals have or not
we do not know.
Then, there was an observation
that came from data collected
by one undergraduate class,
and it appeared that families within our city
that used some extra care of water,
such as boiling or using devices for purification of water,
suffered more from diarrheic diseases.
I said that it could be the other way.
It could be that people who are more susceptible to diarrhea
are more likely to use extra treatment of water.
We investigated on this problem,
and there was a Lancet paper
coming out of this problem.
Then, there are other things,
like evolution of asymmetric cell division in bacteria,
trying to cultivate the uncultivable bacteria,
asking the question why antibiotics are produced
- what is the natural role of antibiotics?
And there are a variety of problems
that we do discuss
and try to come out with something.
Well, this has implications to both areas.
Number one, in the field of research,
it gives certain novel insights,
some inroads into virgin lands, and so on.
But the other is in the field of science education,
in capacity building,
training the minds.
In fact, it is doing a service
by inculcating the ability to ask questions,
the ability to design experiments,
the ability to think critically, and so on.
So, I distinguish between learning about science,
which most of our undergraduate courses do,
and actually learning science,
which is experiencing the process
of making a discovery.
And, through a process of
such uninhibited inquiry,
they undergo a process of making a discovery.
Whether they make a big discovery or not
is of relatively minor importance.
They have to undergo this process.
So, essentially,
this was an experiment,
also an ongoing experiment,
on engaging undergraduates
in their own questions,
encouraging them to initiate science,
not only participate in science,
but initiate research,
and I feel that this model
has been successful.
Only time will tell us
what are the impacts on the careers of these students,
impacts on science in general
in whatever small way it can,
and impact on science education.
So, here are some of my heroes,
the one batch of katta,
and I hope that many of them
turn out to be great scientists in their careers.
Thank you.