Std Research: The Whys and Hows of Establishing New Model Systems in Biology and Neuroscience

Std Research: The Whys and Hows of Establishing New Model Systems in Biology and Neuroscience Std Research: The Whys and Hows of Establishing New Model Systems in Biology and Neuroscience and should go about justifying the establishment of new model systems in biology and behavioral science. The focus will be on two areas of research in which scientists are actively attempting to expand the repertoire of model systems: evolutionary developmental biology (evodevo) and cognitive neuroscience. This examination will be primarily philosophical, though deeply embedded in the details of the relevant science, historically well-grounded, collaborative, and supported by qualitative data collection, synthesis, and analysis. Historians and philosophers of science have made significant contributions especially to the history of the establishment of current experimental models, as well as to the philosophical criticism of historical and contemporary experimental approaches. But this foundational scholarship has not provided any prospective analysis of possible and desirable future trajectories in response to historical analysis and philosophical criticism. This project seeks to fill this lacuna in the history and philosophy of biological and behavioral research with model organisms, and to recommend domain-specific and domain-generic strategies within biology and behavioral science. The PI and graduate student trainee will coordinate a small strategic research network to undertake the research, yielding a suite of scholarly and more popular publications related to justification in science, as well as an online relational database and decision-support resources for working scientists.1