For immediate release
May 18, 2004

The $50 Million Solution

HHMI Ups Investment in College Science Locally, Mount Holyoke College has been awarded a grant of $1.2 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Smith and Amherst also received awards.

CHEVY CHASE, Maryland, May 18, 2004—Colleges face a number of tough challenges in teaching science today. New fields that blur the lines between disciplines are emerging, and biologists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians are forging interdisciplinary collaborations. Scientists trained to be outstanding researchers need to learn to be outstanding teachers. More minorities must be encouraged to pursue scientific careers.

To help colleges meet these challenges, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is awarding $49.7 million in grants to 42 baccalaureate and master's degree institutions in 17 states and Puerto Rico. This brings HHMI's investment in undergraduate science to more than $606 million.

The four-year grants, ranging from $500,000 to $1.6 million, support a variety of programs to improve undergraduate science, from new courses in hot fields such as bioinformatics and computational biology, to fellowships for postdoctoral researchers that include teaching experiences, and a mobile teaching laboratory to bring science to disadvantaged and minority students in remote areas.

Mount Holyoke College has been awarded a grant of $1.2 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). This major grant, to be expended over four years, will support a collaborative effort to build stronger curricular and research connections among the biology and chemistry departments and the biochemistry program they jointly support. Mount Holyoke's project reflects the most important advances in these disciplines over the past decade, and will allow the College to capitalize on the increasing intersections among the research and teaching interests of many of its younger science faculty. The project directors are Craig Woodard, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, and Sean Decatur, Professor of Chemistry.

More information about the Mount Holyoke grant is below.
Although its investigators conduct research at universities and medical schools, HHMI supports science at colleges because they also play a vital role in education, according to Peter Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs at HHMI. "Good science can be done in different settings, in colleges as well as universities," says Bruns. "Colleges are a better learning environment for some students, and they serve underrepresented minorities extremely well."

Undergraduate biology is not well-funded nationally, notes Stephen Barkanic, director of HHMI's undergraduate science education program. "Public and private funders tend to focus their support on research programs, infrastructure, and graduate training, but undergraduate biology tends to be neglected. Smaller colleges and universities, in particular, often are overlooked in the intensive competition for grant dollars."

The new grants encourage collaboration among recipients. Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges in Minnesota, for example, are collaborating with Michigan's Hope College to create faculty teams from biology, the physical sciences, and mathematics who will work together on research and develop interdisciplinary courses and labs.

The grants also support training in teaching for postdoctoral fellows in science. City University of New York Queens College, Occidental College in Los Angeles, and North Carolina's Davidson College, for example, will establish postdoctoral fellowships that provide training and experience in teaching as a component of a strong research program.

Several of the new grants address the ongoing underrepresentation of some minorities in the sciences. Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College in Pennsylvania will bring their strengths in science to a partnership with Philadelphia area schools. Undergraduates and faculty from both colleges will mentor middle- and high-school students, providing laboratory experiences and writing workshops. The colleges also will offer summer workshops for Philadelphia area teachers.

In the lower Rio Grande Valley, where the population is 88 percent Hispanic and the unemployment rate is triple the national average, the University of Texas-Pan American will equip a mobile teaching laboratory staffed with scientist-educators to bring contemporary biology to students and teachers throughout the region. And Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, a historically black institution, will develop after-school and summer science and technology programs to attract the mostly African-American students of the Leon County South Side Schools.

HHMI invited 198 public and private baccalaureate and master's institutions to compete for the new awards. They were selected for their record of preparing students for graduate education and careers in research, teaching, or medicine. A panel of distinguished scientists and educators reviewed proposals and recommended the 42 awards approved by the Institute's Board of Trustees on May 4.

More information about the Mount Holyoke Grant
The grant will provide funding to assess and revise the core biology, chemistry, and biochemistry curricula, in light of overlapping developments in these disciplines; modify and expand the summer student research program to encourage greater teamwork and peer mentoring; integrate advanced instrumentation into introductory courses and revamp laboratory practices to reduce hazardous waste; and develop a new project through the College's SummerMath for Teachers program to prepare elementary and middle-school teachers to use inquiry-based methods in teaching mathematics and science. This is Mount Holyoke's fourth grant from HHMI, which has provided the College with $3.5 million in grants since 1988.

"Mount Holyoke's HHMI project is inspired both by the growing interdependence of contemporary biology and chemistry, and by the synergies made possible by the increasingly interdisciplinary research and teaching interests of our outstanding faculty in both fields," said Mount Holyoke College President Joanne. V. Creighton. "Cutting-edge pedagogy and research within these disciplines now require the integration of techniques, concepts, and approaches from both biology and chemistry. These curricular developments are reflected in and promoted by our just completed $36 million Science Center, which features adjacent and shared state-of-the-art laboratories for the common efforts of biology, chemistry, and biochemistry. We are very grateful for the critical support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in continuing ourexceptional record of preparing women for careers in science."

Please call Kevin McCaffrey, 413-538-2987, for more MHC-related info.

Awardees are: