I want to conduct
my ethnographic fieldwork at the BME lab at WashU where I used to work as an
undergraduate researcher. The lab is interested in both understanding
biological neural systems scientifically and creating related engineering
applications. One question I am curious about is how my colleagues at the lab
feel about the value of their research, and if this assessment depends on
whether they are working on scientific or engineering problems. Secondly, a
research project in the lab can usually be broken down into different tasks, such
as behavioral experiments, neural data recording, data analysis and computational
modeling. I am interested in how much effort our lab members put into each of
these tasks and how they feel about the values of these tasks respectively as
components of the project. Thirdly, I also want to study the relationship between the
goal of achieving scientific understanding and the goal of obtaining publishable
results as demonstrated in the research work in our lab.
I would love to hear about any suggestions or comments.
I think you bring up good points in your questions. In your second question, I think it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the different components' perceived importance by the lab members and how directly related the components are to math and science (i.e. are some of the experimental tasks perceived as more important because it is based more on hard math or science?) Or if this isn't the case, it would be interesting to know of other correlations or understand why they put the values they do on each respective component of the project. Your third question also brings up a very interesting point: people in the science community know the high value of publishable results. Results are the means through which labs get recognition and more funding for future projects. I am curious to know how the desire to get publishable results has potentially changed the direction of the lab's experiments or original goal.
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