|
A four-year, $1.2 million grant from the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for undergraduate science
education will enable CWRU to implement a senior-year capstone
research or service experience in biology, develop a new Bachelor
of Science degree in computational biology and enhance the department's
computing capabilities.
In 1988, CWRU was among the first to receive
HHMI funding to strengthen its science programs. This year's award
is its fourth from the medical research organization whose principal
mission is biomedical research. CWRU is among 44 research universities
to share $80 million in HHMI funds to address the challenges of
a rapidly changing and increasingly interdisciplinary science.
"In this funding round, our goal is to
concentrate our resources as opposed to the past where we spread
the money around to get programs growing. Now we want to integrate
all those programs into our curriculum, without losing sight of
our research mission," said Joseph Koonce, CWRU chair of the department
of biology and director of the HHMI grant.
Efforts will focus on the Summer Program
in Undergraduate Research (SPUR). CWRU will work with Cuyahoga
Community College's Bridges Program where students obtain their
associate degree from Tri-C and continue for their bachelor's
degree at CWRU. The two schools will identify students and will
nurture their interest in science, with participation in SPUR
in the summer before their senior year.
Another change for SPUR is to broaden its
focus to include a science-related service component for students
interested in service-oriented activities. The activities would
be coordinated with service through AmeriCorps' HealthCorps and
AquaCorps. HealthCorps provides health education to the community,
while AquaCorps involves students in ecology projects.
"We want to take advantage of the service-learning
orientation of our students," Koonce said. He sees this as another
untapped avenue to raise interests in science.
The research and service components will
directly tie the summer experience to the new senior-year capstone
experience-a new part of the College of Arts and Sciences General
Education Requirements.
From past poster sessions that culminate
the SPUR experience, Koonce and other faculty members noticed
that students were mastering certain research techniques, with
very little or no follow-up research experiences. Now CWRU students
as well as students from other universities participating in SPUR
must tie their summer experience to a yearlong research project.
For CWRU students, this will be part of independent study courses
in biology.
"We are looking for a better payoff for
our SPUR efforts," Koonce said.
He described past efforts as "a shot-gun
approach" that reached a broad group of students geographically.
The new emphasis on integrating SPUR and Bridges programs creates
a pipeline through Tri-C that Koonce says reaches into middle
and high school through other initiatives at CWRU and Tri-C.
"It's a moving experience to watch kids
get turned on to science and to know that motivation can be easily
extinguished if they don't have the opportunities to follow up
and deepen that appreciation," Koonce said.
He also explains that "it becomes evident
that the students from the minority community are moving away
from science and technology courses very early on, and we are
seeing a progressive loss of diversity in advanced placement courses
in high school."
"No one knows why this is happening," Koonce
added. "If an interest in science in early grades can be maintained
throughout middle school, high school and college, then we can
develop a pipeline that could meaningfully change minority representation
in the sciences."
Another focus of the grant is to develop
the curriculum for a Bachelor of Science degree in computational
biology. The new degree responds to interest in bioinformatics
used in such areas as genome sequencing, stem cell development,
a new emphasis for biology-Great Lakes Modeling Program and evolutionary
biology-where modeling and mathematical analyses are needed. Following
board approval, biology would offer the degree in 2005.
To enable the department to offer the new
degree as well as the new Entrepreneurial Biotechnology Program,
a master's degree program in the application of biology to the
development of new business ventures, the department also received
HHMI support for enhancing the department's computer capabilities.
Koonce also said HHMI support for new initiatives
will assist CWRU's biology department implement its new plan for
changes in curriculum and research programs.
|
