About Us
The Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI) is a volunteer-run, non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing scientific literacy in middle and high school students. The mission of JEI is to teach students how to think clearly and creatively, training them to navigate scientific literature, and write about their experiments in context of their respective scientific fields. Through JEI, students receive extensive feedback on their science projects from active PhD-level scientists, hone their science writing skills, and can publish their work in our free, open-access journal. All articles are published on our website, where they offer a rich resource for educators to teach their students how to approach and appreciate professional science writing.
Since 2011, JEI has provided secondary school students the opportunity to publish their original research in our free, open-access journal. During this time, we received over 900 submitted manuscripts from six continents, and published 250 original scientific articles from middle and high school students around the world. Over the last year alone, we've processed 210 submissions and published 73 articles, thanks to an active volunteer staff of over 250 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research faculty. Here's a link to our latest issue!
How will my donation support JEI?
JEI is supported by an entirely volunteer staff, and over 98% of our funds go towards providing educational experiences for students. This includes the cost of our online publication and editing platform and our growing outreach efforts. It costs $30 to support one publication from a student author from submission to review to editing to publication, a process that takes a young scientist and introduces them to the global research community. Additionally, your donations will go towards several initiatives at JEI that we are excited to pursue in 2020 and beyond:
1) Growing the JEI as a publication: In 2020, we expect to receive about 5 new submissions every week! That means we'll need to ramp up volunteer recruiting efforts and dedicate more funds to maintaining our publication software to effectively mentor our student authors as they navigate the scientific publication process.
2) Expanding outreach efforts and building the JEI Camp: This year, we ran a successful pilot of an outreach camp where we hosted 12 Boston Public School students at Harvard Medical School to take them through the entire scientific process from generating research questions to performing experiments to writing manuscripts. We plan to expand these efforts to widen the number and background of the students we can host, and also plan to put this program in place at other universities located across the USA.
3) Hiring a full-time JEI Executive Director: JEI is 100% volunteer-run, but to ensure its long-term success as an internationally recognized non-profit science education organization will require someone who can dedicate all of their efforts to fundraising and advancing our mission. It is our aim to identify and recruit such a leader in the next year to enable our goal of mentoring young scientists all across the globe.
Please contact us at questions@emerginginvestigators.org with any questions or comments! Detailed expense reports as well as projected 3-year expenses are available upon request.
Media Coverage about JEI
From Students to Scientists , American Educator
Inside JEI, the peer-reviewed journal for middle and high school scientists , Cell Press Blog
Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Scientists , Nexus Media
Science Mentoring: Journal of Emerging Investigators , Nature Blog
JEI Staff on Scientific Education
Incorporating Primary Scientific Literature in Middle and High School Education , Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education
Next-generation training: publishing student scientists' research , Trends in Pharmacological Sciences
