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Nat sound: Do you have the sequence of the element? Where’s your file? Dynamic Genome,
the idea is to reinvigorate the undergraduate classroom, to make it a much more exciting
place, to create or generate a teaching program that is closely tied to my research laboratory.
Mobile DNA, transposable elements has been the focus of my research lab for almost thirty
years. The projects, the expertise, the equipment, the excitement from the research lab will
form the basis for the undergraduate classroom. One of the problems with our undergraduate
teaching is we’re kind of boring students to death. Mainly because we’re telling them
about science, not doing it. It’s just this disconnect between the excitement and the
research lab and the lack of excitement in an undergraduate classroom that we’re hoping
to fix with this kind of arrangement. At first I thought it was going to be a lot of lecturing
because that’s what I’m used to coming in from high school, but it’s been a complete
change for the good because I get to do a lot of hands-on stuff and I really do appreciate
that. We have two separate classrooms that students utilize during their three hours.
So, they go back and forth. One is a computer classroom and one is a wet lab and this really
reflects the prevalence of computational analysis in almost all of modern biology. Much like
in a real research lab, the students will start thinking about an experiment by doing
computational analysis, design their experiment in the computer and then come in and perform
that experiment. We also teach the students how to do experiments and this is going to
be critical no matter where they go in the next four years as students. I’m thinking
of going into medicine and all of the research that we’re doing now really extends into
the whole medical field and so I believe that this really gives me sort of a heads start
on the whole genetics field. What I wanted to build here and we were able to build here
was truly a state-of-the-art facility. There’s no lab like this anywhere in the world. All
classrooms should be like this. You really get the opportunity to feel important, feel
like you’re part of what’s going on and feel like you’re part of the big science
population that’s out there.