Georgetown Lands Major HHMI Grant to Invigorate Science Teaching and Reach Under-Served Students
A year ago, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute issued a challenge to 224 undergraduate colleges nationwide: identify creative new ways to engage your students in the biological sciences.
Now 48 of the nation’s best undergraduate institutions – including Georgetown College, the only Kentucky school selected – will share in $60 million of grants to help them usher in a new era of science education. Colleges in 21 states and Puerto Rico will receive $700,000 to $1.6 million over the next four years to revitalize their life sciences undergraduate instruction. HHMI has challenged colleges to create more engaging science classes, bring real-world research experiences to students, and increase the diversity of students who study science.
Georgetown College faculty know that incoming freshmen are often deterred by fear from taking science courses, but with $1.3 million in new funding from HHMI, the College is designing new programs to bolster student confidence and excitement in science. HHMI program director Mark Christensen, a Biology professor at Georgetown, said his committee will be working with the Admissions office to “encourage minorities and focus especially on the under-served students” of Kentucky and neighboring Appalachian regions.
Georgetown wants to equip all of its students to appreciate science's impact on society and to prepare them to pursue scientific careers. To do that, the College plans to help its students discover the breadth and excitement of scientific discovery through a variety of interactions with working scientists. "We want to show students their fears are unfounded," Christensen said. "A lot of students have great aptitude and potential in science that they're not even aware of."
A science careers seminar will introduce students to professional scientists from academia, industry, government, and non-profit organizations. Starting in the summer of 2010, the seminar will help create and foster mentoring relationships between freshmen and sophomores and scientists from Georgetown or other institutions, giving students an opportunity to become more comfortable with research and learn what skills they need to succeed in science, Christensen said.
To ensure that its students are ready to confront the kind of science researchers are doing today, Georgetown is also revising its curriculum, designing new courses that emphasize computation and bioinformatics. "Our idea is to link lab work with bioinformatic methods," Christensen explained. "We want our students to learn how to search genomic and proteomic databases and use the output to design and interpret their own experiments."
As they move toward graduation, students will have access to a new, HHMI-funded summer research program. Students can choose to do research with a Georgetown faculty member or a scientist at another institution. There will be 10 such projects at Georgetown and 10 elsewhere. Alternatively, students can work with a faculty mentor to design and test a short-term research project that can be incorporated into one of the College's introductory science courses.
Said Christensen with both excitement and humility, “This is the first time we’ve been able to take the lead at Georgetown and pay a stipend to a (science) student.”
According to Georgetown College Provost Rosemary Allen, this grant will help the College continue to expand an already successful science program. She said, “It is an endorsement of the vision of the faculty in our science division and their commitment to quality education in the sciences.”
The 2008 HHMI grant winners were selected through a stringent review process by distinguished scientists and educators that narrowed the 192 applicants down to 48 winners. The institute invited 224 colleges with a track record of preparing undergraduate students for research careers to submit proposals.
“The undergraduate years are vital to attracting and retaining students who will be the future of science,” said HHMI President Thomas R. Cech. “We want students to experience science as the creative, challenging, and rewarding endeavor that it is.”
HHMI is the nation’s largest private supporter of science education. It has invested more than $1.2 billion in grants to reinvigorate life science education at both research universities and liberal arts colleges and to engage the nation’s leading scientists in teaching. In 2007, it launched the Science Education Alliance, which will serve as a national resource for the development and distribution of innovative science education materials and methods.
One of the world's largest philanthropies, HHMI is a nonprofit medical research organization that employs hundreds of leading biomedical scientists working at the forefront of their fields. HHMI has an endowment of approximately $18.7 billion. Its headquarters are located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.