In fact, faculty then held what he thought was an elitist view of not even wanting any undergraduates around research labs.

“There was a huge separation between faculty status and undergraduate status then, or even graduate status for that matter,” said Coleman, adding that it also was uncommon then for graduate students to publish with their faculty mentors before they finished their graduate studies.

What a difference a few decades can make.
That lack of experience as a baccalaureate student helped Coleman develop an awareness that getting undergraduates involved in research could be advantageous for them and their faculty mentors and contributed to his role as an enthusiastic proponent of undergraduate research at USC.

A portion of the payoff for Coleman’s efforts came this past spring when he received the Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year Award from the Office of Undergraduate Research. Award recipients are selected from the pool of faculty sponsors of Discovery Day in which undergraduates make presentations on their research experiences.

“I’ve had a philosophy since coming here that undergraduates can play a vital role in high-quality research,” said Coleman, who also directs the psychology department’s Summer Research Institute.

The National Science Foundation-funded institute is in its 14th year of bringing undergraduates to USC from colleges and universities throughout the country for an intensive summer research experience in experimental psychology.

Coleman’s research with Janet L. Fisher and Steven P. Wilson on ways to control epileptic seizures through gene transfer into the brain also has had numerous undergraduate research success stories with USC students, including one who recently won a Goldwater Fellowship. Fisher is a faculty member in and Wilson is chair of the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Neuroscience of the USC School of Medicine.

Working in research projects is valuable for undergraduates because it allows them to experience details of data collection procedures well beyond textbooks and the classroom, Coleman said. Commitment to a research project enables the students to attain a sense of achievement not available in classroom or other University settings.

Research for undergraduates also opens their eyes to the possibility of attending graduate school for those who haven’t thought of it before, but also can help them think about empirical approaches and what they can accomplish, even if what they will do is quite different from their research experience, Coleman added.

“Some of the students who go on to graduate school become outstanding in their field without originally having had the intention of going into that field,” said Coleman, noting one former student who became a graduate student and eventually a successful faculty member.

“I remember him going to Johns Hopkins as a researcher and he confided to me that he wouldn’t have done it without the research experience he’d had as an undergraduate,” Coleman said.

An additional benefit for faculty mentors of having undergraduates in a research lab is that the students can bring different ideas to the work place, Coleman said. “That can be exciting because they can give you a different perspective. Sometimes it’s valuable even for me to think about some of those issues.”

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