Five assistant professors are pursuing instructional innovations—launching courses on urban culture in Paris and Berlin, popular music and American women's history; creating a tropical pediatrics handbook; and revamping the bioinformatics and computational genomics curriculum—using their recently awarded Glennan Fellowships.

Jutta Ittner, modern languages and literatures; Mary E. Davis, music; Renee Sentilles, history; S. Cenk Sahinalp, electrical engineering and computer science and genetics; and Chandy C. John, pediatrics and medicine, are the 2002-2003 recipients of the $6,500 awards.

The University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) awards Glennan Fellowships annually to five junior, tenure-track faculty to support creative work in teaching and education. The fellowships are named for the late T. Keith Glennan, president of Case Institute of Technology from 1947-66.

With her Glennan grant, Davis will create an undergraduate course that covers the history of American popular music-from the blues and jazz to disco and techno. The class will explore regional traditions, multicultural influences, the impact of recording technologies and the role of the music industry. Davis also plans to look at pop music within the context of social, political and cultural history.

Sentilles also will lay the groundwork for a new course, one on advanced topics in American women's history, with her Glennan grant. The class, which will include a section on the relationship of women to the medical profession, will help the University "educate our students about the differences among them with the goal of reaching greater understanding, support, acceptance and collegiality," according to Sentilles.

Using research she compiled from a recent trip to Germany, Ittner will develop a college seminar that will meet new general education requirements. The course, "Paris/Berlin: A Comparative Study of Urban Culture," will look at the modern city through the study of the two European urban centers. Topics will include the city and its self-image, the city as site of collective memory and cultural center, the city as a symbol of government, the city in literature and films and the city and illness, among others.

John plans to use his Glennan grant to create a manual that is written, field-tested and revised by students, residents and staff physicians taking care of infants and children in developing countries. The reference book will include information about diseases in the third world, diagnostic methods and treatment options. Few reference books on tropical pediatrics exist, and those that do are incomplete, out of date, theoretical rather than practical and "too bulky for rapid reference," according to John.

With his Glennan grant, Sahinalp will restructure the bioinformatics curriculum to include "closer collaboration between the medical and engineering schools for preparing graduate and undergraduate students toward top-level research in the fast-growing field." His project aims to enhance the computational component of an interdisciplinary bioinformatics program that enables students to obtain masters and doctoral degrees within existing departmental degree-granting programs. He plans to create an introductory course; seminar series; and explore additional collaborations, including summer internships, mini-conferences and long-term employment, with CWRU's Center for Computational Genomics.