The four-year grants to universities in 28 states and the District of Columbia range from $1.2 million to $2.2 million each. A panel of scientists and educators reviewed proposals from 189 institutions.
"Biology is progressing so rapidly and interfacing with so many other disciplines that undergraduate teaching runs the risk of substituting quantity for quality," says HHMI President Thomas R. Cech, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist. "Through these grants, the Institute is providing resources to help universities bring their undergraduate science teaching up to the level of their research programs."
The dichotomy between research and teaching concerns Peter J. Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs. "One barrier to linking research and education is the lack of opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows—who are the future professors—to acquire teaching skills and experience," says Bruns, who was a professor of biology at Cornell University before he joined HHMI.
The new grants support programs that can become models for bringing undergraduate teaching and research closer together, as well as exposing undergraduates to emerging fields in biology and to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the life sciences. They also support efforts to attract minorities to science and to encourage them to choose scientific careers. Programs include interdisciplinary laboratory courses in areas such as bioinformatics, proteomics and tissue engineering, as well as new faculty, laboratory equipment, curriculum development and student research opportunities.
This is the 10th round of HHMI grants to enhance undergraduate science education and the 5th competition targeting research universities. Since 1988, the Institute has awarded $556 million to 236 colleges and universities in 47 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a medical research organization whose principal mission is biomedical research. HHMI employs 336 Hughes investigators who conduct basic medical research in HHMI laboratories at 70 medical centers and universities nationwide. Through its complementary grants program, the Institute supports science education in the United States and a select group of biomedical scientists abroad.
A list of new grant recipients follows:
| California Institute of Technology | Pasadena, CA | $1.8 million |
| Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh, PA | $2.2 million |
| Case Western Reserve University | Cleveland, OH | $1.2 million |
| Clemson University | Clemson, SC | $1.8 million |
| College of William and Mary | Williamsburg, VA | $1.6 million |
| Cornell University | Ithaca, NY | $1.9 million |
| Duke University | Durham, NC | $1.8 million |
| Emory University | Atlanta, GA | $1.8 million |
| Florida State University | Tallahassee, FL | $1.6 million |
| George Washington University | Washington, DC | $1.7 million |
| Georgetown University | Washington, DC | $2.2 million |
| Harvard University | Cambridge, MA | $1.6 million |
| Indiana University at Bloomington | Bloomington, IN | $2.2 million |
| The Johns Hopkins University | Baltimore, MD | $2.2 million |
| Kansas State University | Manhattan, KS | $1.6 million |
| Louisiana State University and A&M College | Baton Rouge, LA | $1.8 million |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Cambridge, MA | $2 million |
| Montana State University | Bozeman, MT | $1.9 million |
| New York University | New York, NY | $1.7 million |
| North Carolina State University | Raleigh, NC | $1.6 million |
| Oklahoma State University Main Campus | Stillwater, OK | $1.6 million |
| Oregon State University | Corvallis, OR | $1.9 million |
| Princeton University | Princeton, NJ | $1.9 million |
| Purdue University | West Lafayette, IN | $2 million |
| Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | Troy, NY | $1.2 million |
| Stanford University | Stanford, CA | $2 million |
| State University of New York at Stony Brook | Stony Brook, NY | $1.9 million |
| Texas Tech University | Lubbock, TX | $2 million |
| University of Alabama | Tuscaloosa, AL | $1.8 million |
| University of Arizona | Tucson, AZ | $1.8 million |
| University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley, CA | $1.2 million |
| University of California, Los Angeles | Los Angeles, CA | $2 million |
| University of Chicago | Chicago, IL | $1.2 million |
| University of Colorado at Boulder | Boulder, CO | $2.2 million |
| University of Delaware | Newark, DE | $1.7 million |
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Urbana, IL | $1.7 million |
| University of Maryland Baltimore County | Baltimore, MD | $2 million |
| University of Maryland | College Park, MD | $1.8 million |
| University of Miami | Coral Gables, FL | $2.1 million |
| University of Minnesota-Twin Cities | Minneapolis, MN | $1.7 million |
| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Chapel Hill, NC | $1.6 million |
| University of Washington | Seattle, WA | $2.2 million |
| Washington University | St. Louis, MO | $2.2 million |
| Yale University | New Haven, CT | $2.1 million |
For more information: www.hhmi.org/news/070902.htm
EXAMPLES of innovative projects supported by the new HHMI grants
• Emory University will establish teams of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to mentor undergraduates and work on new curricula incorporating emerging fields such as bioinformatics and new approaches such as the use of problem-based learning. Members of the Atlanta University Center, a consortium that includes historically black colleges and universities, will comprise the teams.
• Montana State University will focus on recruitment and retention of women and Native Americans through partnerships with the American Indian Research Organization and a consortium of the state's tribal colleges. To help attract more Native American undergraduates, the university plans a six-week summer research and development program for high school students and teachers from Montana's seven Indian reservations.
• Princeton University will develop an experimental course in molecular biology to introduce undergraduates in engineering, physics and mathematics to quantitative thinking in biology. It will emphasize measurement and data interpretation using mathematical modeling. The course could serve as a model of a biology requirement for engineering and physical sciences majors.
• Stanford University will develop interactive Web-based virtual laboratories and other teaching aids to supplement classroom instruction in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular, cell and developmental biology. Six interactive, Web-based units in physiology, already developed under a previous HHMI grant, will be made available to the public.
• At the University of California, Los Angeles, graduate students interested in undergraduate teaching careers will participate in a university teaching fellows program in which they will develop and teach introductory level undergraduate seminars in their fields, as well as general science seminars for non-science majors. The program's goal is to develop future college and university teachers and to create a unique scientific community of undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty members.
• The University of Colorado at Boulder will establish the Genomics Teaching Place, a central laboratory-teaching facility where undergraduates and K-12 students and teachers can study genomics, bioinformatics and computational biology.
• The University of Delaware will focus on improving the teaching skills of faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who participate in the Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education, also developed by the university with HHMI support. Faculty and graduate students will develop new stand-alone investigative laboratories for introductory biology, biochemistry and chemistry courses. The laboratory courses will be taught by research faculty, and the experiments will be developed by postdoctoral fellows and graduate students who want curriculum design and teaching experience.
• The University of Maryland Baltimore County is developing an academic, research and community-support program for minority undergraduates to prepare them for graduate school, modeled after the university's successful Meyerhoff Scholarship Program, a top producer of science majors who go on to graduate study. The HHMI program will begin with laboratories for freshmen and progress to independent research in the lab of an HHMI investigator or another active research scientist.
• The University of Washington will expand the university's partnership with community colleges, bringing community college biology instructors to the university campus for summer workshops in current research, laboratory materials and teaching strategies in an area of biology of their choosing.
• Washington University in St. Louis will establish a science-education fellows program. After completing traditional summer research fellowships, science majors interested in education can spend another summer in classrooms developing educational materials. The fellows will pursue a novel, five-year combined degree program leading to a bachelor of arts in science and a master's degree in teaching.