Introduction
Representation matters. For young students from the Global South who want to start a career in science, systemic knowledge gaps and other barriers persist, making access to higher education in North America and Europe more difficult. Evolutionary Biology is not an exception, despite ongoing efforts to increase inclusion. To help address this, we created an online, free, and inclusive Evolutionary Biology Crash Course and other affiliated services and opportunities to help prospective students achieve a better understanding of and access to the field.
Our Mission
We seek to increase our participant’s chances of obtaining access to high level master's programmes, and an opportunity at a career as future evolutionary biologists. We envision a future where evolutionary biology as a field is more inclusive, representative, and accessible to all those who want to make their mark and better the world.
The past and the future!
Our first edition of the crash course was held online, and ran from July 11th to 23rd, 2022. We considered it a huge success, with over 700 students registered (from 62 countries), active engagement from participants both during and after, and many moments of meaningful learning. In fact, we considered the crash course to be so successful and impactful that we decided to expand our services! Now, we not only run our core crash course, but we also have an active mentorship program, a mini grant program, competitions, and engagement/outreach through social media. Please check out the pages on our website for more details!
Who Are We?
We are fellow students (MSc and PhD level), recent graduates, and early career researchers who are passionate about making our field a more inclusive, accessible, and representative place. We want to enable all students to have the same opportunity to pursue an impactful, rewarding, and meaningful career in evolutionary biology.
It all started when our founder, Sergio González-Mollinedo, had this dream, and shared it with his peers. Now, with a growing team of hardworking, diverse, passionate volunteers, this dream is becoming a reality. This is an endeavour that each volunteer member has taken on in addition to their regular workload, and we devote our time to it because we truly care about the positive impact we can generate. We hope that you as a participant in some or all our services can help reap the benefits of our ideas and hard work, and we can’t wait to see you in our course and/or other events!
Practicalities
Registration
The 2023 edition of EvoBio Crash Course will run from the 12-23 of June. The registration is open, until May 30th (23:59 CET) 2023 on this link.
As always, our next edition of the Evolutionary Biology Crash Course will be completely free, and held online for two weeks. Running the course online will enable as many students as possible from around the world, and from different time zones, to be able to access the content and actively engage with the class.
Our course is absolutely open to everyone, so please do register and attend! Please note though that we are especially encouraging students from the Global South to attend, for we feel this demographic is often facing the most barriers to the next-step of their evolutionary biology journey.
We hope to see you there!
Entry Requirements
Our course is designed for everyone and anyone to join in, and we merely hope that you have an interest in evolutionary biology. Already being engaged in the field is not a requirement, but we do ask you to consider that our course is designed for undergraduate students with a background in the Biological Sciences.
Certificates of Completion
Once you’ve completed our course, we hand out a certificate of completion. Depending on how you took the course, we give out two types of certificates.
Type 1. This certification is given to students who attend and engage in at least 50% of the live Q&A sessions, and who hand in all the practical exercises.
Type 2. This certification is given to students who follow the course on their own time, and who do not attend the live sessions.
Other Services and Opportunities
With the success of our 2022 crash course, we have grown as a program and as a team. With all our new volunteers, we have had the opportunity to grow our services and opportunities to address other components of aiding students in accessing the next steps of their evolutionary biology journey. For 2023, this will include our new mini grant program, an academic poster competition (running from 26-27 of June), our mentorship program, outreach through social media, and a translation initiative to make our content even more accessible. All of these new program components are designed to address other aspects of accessibility to the field of evolutionary biology, and we thus hope to make all services and opportunities complementary and cohesive with regards to one another.
Funding
We are excited to announce that the SMBE IDEA Task Force is funding the second edition of our crash course, as well as our other endeavours! The first edition of our crash course was made possible thanks to funding provided by the Equal Opportunities Initiative Fund of the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). Moreover, we are kindly supported by the Erasmus Mundus Master in Evolutionary Biology (MEME). If you are an institution or organization who likes what we do, and you wish to provide support in some way (be it financial, prizes for our academic competitions, logistical support, etc.) please reach out to us. We would love to hear from you!