Northfield, Minn.––Carleton College, along with 47 other colleges and universities, is the recipient of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grant to usher in a new era of science education.
Carleton, one of only two Minnesota institutions to receive the grant along with Gustavus Adolphus College, received a grant of $1.5 million over the next four years.
Carleton is using part of the $1.5 million grant from HHMI to prepare its students to move beyond traditional approaches to address real-world scientific complexity. Carleton will develop programs that prepare students to tackle scientific problems as teams, to analyze data with quantitative methods, and to communicate complex information effectively. Faculty members will support a focus on complexity by strengthening teaching and research skills and developing computer-modeling collaborations involving the science and the mathematics departments.
“The most important problems we face in science are problems of complexity,” says Fernán Jaramillo, associate professor of biology and HHMI program director at Carleton. “Think of the problems we are trying to solve in neuroscience, genomics, and the environment. All of them require contributions from many different fields. Computer modeling provides a common language for translating and coordinating these contributions.”
In biology, Carleton aims to develop new computer modeling courses and exercises that are relevant to areas such as neuroscience and population dynamics. The physics and chemistry departments will develop enhanced computer models of both quantum and classical system dynamics at the atomic and molecular levels. And the environmental science faculty will revise its curriculum to use computer-modeling techniques to help students analyze and better visualize the complex relationship between social and natural phenomena. Faculty workshops focusing on complex systems will provide the opportunity for faculty to update, sustain, and develop their scientific and teaching skills as they relate to complex systems, interdisciplinary modeling, computation, visualization and team-based learning.
“We need to increase the competency of our faculty in terms of exploring complexity if we are going to prepare students to tackle our most important problems,” Jaramillo says.
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.
“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.”
The grant recipients, primarily undergraduate institutions, include traditional liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and larger state institutions, all united by a commitment to teaching undergraduates. A separate HHMI grants program supports science education at American research universities.
The HHMI grants allow for flexibility and creativity so schools can identify novel strategies that may work in a variety of settings with a variety of students. Some schools will add modern techniques or interdisciplinary classes to their traditional curriculum, while others will completely redesign their biological science majors.
“This diverse pool of grant recipients and large number of first-time awardees shows that HHMI is committed to fund new ideas and new ways of approaching science education,” said Peter J. Bruns, HHMI’s vice president for grants and special programs. “We want to help create successful models for teaching science that can spread throughout the higher education community.”
Creating interdisciplinary science classes and incorporating more mathematics into the biology curriculum were among the major themes proposed by the schools. Many schools will also allow more students to experience research through classroom-based courses and summer laboratory programs.
“Liberal arts colleges— particularly some of our grantee institutions—have long been successful in educating future scientists,” said Cech, himself a graduate of a liberal arts institution, Grinnell College (Iowa).
Distinguished scientists and educators narrowed 192 applicants down to 48 successful awardees through a stringent review process. HHMI invited 224 colleges with a track record of preparing undergraduate students for research careers to submit proposals.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, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C.