Course Overview

Starting from questions of farmers and from the customer’s demands, together with the students we design experiments to be performed in the lab. Then, the students harvest the resulting data and together with the teacher, students will choose the most efficient data mining way to process the results. In the last, the students work to present their analyses and their conclusions of the experiments regarding the initial professional and scientific questions. The objective of this teaching unit is to push the students to translate a socioeconomic demand in scientific question that has to be solved, to build a project as a proposal for an application call, describing the work-package, the project management and the financial support. In addition, the student will work together with the teachers as project teams to develop skills in project team management and communications.

Learning Achievement

The students will visit farms and producer’s experimental devices in order to discuss about the main problems encountered that affect production in terms of plant yield or quality. A particular focus will be paid to the eco-physiological status of the plants regarding the effects of abiotic stresses i.e. heat stress or biotic stresses induced by pathogens (viruses, bacteria or fungi). Concerning the customer demands, the students will study how to evaluate the quality of the plant production considering health benefits or health protection with a particular emphasis for safety (i.e. microbiological contaminant) or nutritional added value (i.e. secondary metabolites), etc.
＜To Be Continued to "Others">

Competence

Nurture the ability of the student to identify and solve health and food security problems that arise in social and natural environments different from the ones of the student’s home country through both practical laboratory and field work.

Course prerequisites

Grading Philosophy

Students are evaluated based on their reports and defence. A grade ’A’ is awarded to students with a good investment in the discussions with producers, a clear translation of the socio-economic demand into scientific questions and a good explanation of the project and its issues during the oral defence and in the report.

Course schedule

1. Farms and producers’ experimental devices visits concerning plant management under biotic and abiotic stress pressures. Interview for consumer demands
2. Discussion with course faculty/lecturers concerning experimental and project design
3. Lab work to test the hypotheses

Course type

Training/Lab Experiments/Practical Application

Online Course Requirement

Instructor

Professors of University of Bordeaux (UBx)

Other information

＜Continued from "Course Objectives(Learning Outcomes)">
1. Students will be able to generally translate the demands of the professionals into scientific questions (“From field”);
2. Students will be able to learn how to solve the scientific questions by testing hypotheses in a lab context (“to Lab”)
3. Students will be able to learn how to manage scientific questions and how to organise discussion with senior scientist
4. Students will be able identify/pose global-scale challenges related to Sciences based on themes related to plant production and human health;
5. Students will be able to learn how to summarize a seminar by extracting the main ideas and synthetize the topic born from discussions with invited scientists and other students.

Site for Inquiry

Link to the syllabus provided by the university