Co-Adventurers in Discovery: Collaborative Research Between Undergraduate Students and Faculty

There are many opportunities available beyond the classroom for undergraduate students to engage in cutting-edge scholarship. Some of the opportunities include study abroad, internships, and independent study. We strongly suggest that students experience such programs. Independent study courses can serve not only to sharpen the student’s engagement skills with the open-ended questions of current research, but also to enhance his or her own relationship with faculty. In this article we share the experiences of a biology student and a mathematics faculty member coming together as co-adventurers learning from each other about the mechanisms and mathematics involved in cardiac arrhythmia through collaborative mathematical modeling research. Biology and mathematics have a long history of an explosive synergy that enriches and extends both fields (Cohen, 2004) (Reed, 2004), and this synergy led us to the fruitful journey reported here. As there is no end in sight for opportunities to engage in such multi-disciplinary student-faculty collaborative research, we encourage everyone to take advantage of such opportunities.