Howard Hughes Medical Institute's $1.4 million grant to University of Richmond will make science 'add up' in new introductory course
April 24, 2008
A $1.4 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to the University of Richmond will enable faculty to integrate all five sciences majors into a new, two-semester introductory "supercourse" for highly motivated science students.
The course will replace standard introductory classes in biology, chemistry, physics, math and computer science for top science students, emphasizing quantitative skills to investigate pertinent science questions, such as modeling HIV proteins and analyzing how they bind to drugs. The university expects the course to better prepare the exceptional students for upper-level courses in each major, which they will begin taking as sophomores.
Additional projects to benefit from the grant include outreach training for middle school science teachers, undergraduate research projects for freshmen and sophomores, and continuation of five-week science lab internships for under-represented minority students during the summer before they enter Richmond as freshmen. The internships were originally launched with a previous HHMI grant.
"We've found that students who don't have at least a rudimentary background in computer science are at a real disadvantage in biology, chemistry and physics," says Kathy Hoke, associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and a mathematics professor. "The ties that bind the disciplines tend to be computational."
The emphasis on computation is reflected by new courses being offered at Richmond in bioinformatics, biophysics, computational science, neuropharmacology and systems biology. Hoke says all the subjects combine elements from multiple fields and that progress in each requires the use of databases and quantitative methods.
Systems biology, for example, draws heavily on genomics and molecular biology—data-intensive fields. So does epidemiology, the study of medical trends in human populations. Richmond will add a faculty member teaching epidemiology this year.
"We've found that questions about disease really engage students from a variety of majors," Hoke said, "and epidemiology draws on multiple disciplines. With the growing concern about pandemics, there is a shortage of epidemiologists, and this approach will produce more students ready to enter work or graduate school in the discipline."
Richmond's new approach is a bold step in the teaching of introductory science, one taken at only a few institutions in the country, says Betsy Curtler, the university's assistant vice president for foundation, corporate and government relations.
"This method will set a new standard in higher education of combining science with math and exposing top students to all five sciences," Curtler explained. "The virtues of an integrated introductory science course will provide an undergraduate experience like none other in the country."
Curtler says that Olga Troyanskaya, an assistant professor at Princeton University's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics who graduated summa cum laude in computer science and biology from Richmond in 1999, introduced a number of Richmond's science professors to faculty and students in the Princeton program, which pioneered a similar approach. Richmond expects Troyanskaya to return to the campus as a seminar speaker in the project.
A committee of faculty and staff met weekly last spring and summer to generate the ideas in the proposal. The committee will lead its implementation. Members include: Hoke, who will direct the grant; Lisa Gentile and Carol Parish, chemistry; April Hill and Krista Stenger, biology; Lester Caudill, mathematics; Barry Lawson, computer science; Ovidiu Lipan, physics; Matthew Levy, coordinator of assessment and technology operations; and Curtler.
Also included in the new grant is an outreach component for area middle school math teachers. Experienced local schoolteachers and volunteers on the university's science faculty will assist a math professor and education professor in creating a course for middle school teachers on how to incorporate data from scientific experiments into school math classes.
The teachers will learn hands-on experiments they can do in classrooms to generate data and show how it can be used to illustrate middle school math concepts.
The HHMI grant will enable a team of Richmond faculty to spend a year developing the new integrated quantitative science course, which will enroll students beginning in fall 2009.