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October
22, 2004
$1.2-Million
Howard Hughes Grant Helps MHC Sciences
 Photo
by: Todd M. LeMieux
Sean Decatur (left) and Craig Woodard |
Mount
Holyoke science faculty are already hard at work on projects funded
by a $1.2-million grant awarded to the College last May by the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Chemistry professor Sean
Decatur and Craig Woodard, associate professor of biological sciences,
are codirectors of the four-year grant, one of the largest in the
College’s history. The grant
provides funding in four areas.
The largest portion of the grant is earmarked for student summer research projects.
These projects, designed by faculty with rising seniors, are based on the highly
successful Cascade Mentoring Program, which pairs the rising senior with a rising
sophomore to work under the supervision of a professor.
“The opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research is necessary to gain
admission to graduate or medical school,” Woodard said. “And the
mentoring experience helps the more advanced student to more fully understand
her research because she has to communicate it.”
Woodard noted that the summer research program is one of the few such opportunities
available to rising sophomores. “These students get to pursue scientific
research and find out if it’s the direction they want to follow. In many
cases, it’s easier for a student to learn from another student than from
a professor. That’s why the mentoring system works so well.”
The HHMI grant is also funding a comprehensive revision and synchronization of
the basic biology and chemistry curricula. Decatur explained that as the boundaries
between biology and chemistry increasingly overlap, students must “understand
the way that biology informs and drives chemistry, and the way that chemistry
informs and drives biology.” He pointed out that three-quarters of students
who take first- and second-year biology also take chemistry. “We want to
take advantage of that synergy,” Decatur said. “We want biology students
to take chemistry not only because they have to, but so they can see how the
sciences fit together.”
The third component of the grant provides funding to develop experiments for
introductory courses involving advanced laboratory equipment. This will not only
expose students to important concepts earlier in their scientific education but
will also reinforce the natural connections between chemistry and biology. The
grant will permit the College to hire part-time technical staff in both chemistry
and biology to aid in incorporating this advanced instrumentation in introductory
courses. Much of this work is done by professors, who will now have more time
to help students doing research.
Finally, the grant supports SummerMath for Teachers, a significant outreach program
for precollege teachers, now in its twenty-second year. The HHMI grant is being
used to create a professional development program for K-8 teachers, similar to
the program for teachers of grades 7-12 established under a previous HHMI grant.
Like the earlier program, the K-8 program will promote inquiry-based learning,
showing teachers how to implement lessons that encourage students to approach
math problems much as they would science experiments: establishing hypotheses,
designing and testing possible solutions, and deriving conclusions based on their
own investigation.
“Too often mathematics and science have been taught as single subjects
divorced from each other,” said Virginia Bastable, director of the SummerMath
for Teachers program. “If teachers take on an inquiry approach to their
instruction and encourage students to pursue their own questions and ideas, mathematics
and science can be blended together and students can come to see both as tools
for making sense of their world.”
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