PASADENA, Calif.—The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded $1.5 million to the California Institute of Technology for support of interdisciplinary undergraduate science education programs.
The four-year grant to Caltech is one of the 50 awards the HHMI is conferring this year, at a total expenditure of $86.4 million, to bolster programs that bridge biology and other disciplines such as chemistry, physics, engineering, and computational science. At Caltech, the funding will be used to pioneer several new programs, including a training program in synthetic biology, a course- and lab-development assistance program in science and engineering, a series of interdisciplinary undergraduate lab courses, and a precollege outreach program directed at local public schools.
According to Christina Smolke, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Caltech and director of Caltech's HHMI undergraduate science education program, the focus will be on interdisciplinary training and the development of programs that span the gap between science and engineering. The emphasis on a synthetic biology training program will be particularly innovative because the emerging discipline represents an exciting and rapidly evolving area of research that has significant potential to solve pressing human needs.
"Synthetic biology is the application of engineering design principles to the construction of biological systems," explains Smolke, a specialist in the field who will head this training program and teach an undergraduate lab supported by the HHMI grant. "Examples of products emerging from research in synthetic biology that have significant potential to affect human capacity are bacteria engineered to produce alternative energy sources or 'smart' therapeutic systems that can target treatments to diseased cells.
"Researchers in this field come from diverse backgrounds such as biology, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, and computer science. This diversity is reflected in the Caltech research faculty who will be involved in this training program including Richard Murray, Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Michael Elowitz, assistant professor of biology and applied physics, and Erik Winfree, assistant professor of computer science and computational and neural systems."
The second new program supported by the grant will provide opportunities for Caltech undergraduates to participate in developing science and engineering courses and labs. This undergraduate course-assistant program, lead by Douglas Rees, Dickinson Professor of Chemistry and coprincipal investigator of this grant, is being developed in response to requests from Caltech undergraduates for such opportunities to gain experience in instruction.
In addition, the HHMI grant will provide funding for three new undergraduate lab courses reflecting core interdisciplinary strengths of research at Caltech: a physical biology lab to be taught by Rob Phillips, professor of applied physics and mechanical engineering, a biomolecular engineering lab to be taught by Smolke, and a neuroscience and neurophysiology lab to be taught by neurobiology professor Erin Schuman.
Smolke says that the purpose of her biomolecular engineering lab is to teach undergraduates design principles in biological systems. Students will conduct major open-ended design projects in which they will design, construct, and characterize engineered biological systems. "This class focuses on the design of cellular systems such that students may build a genetic circuit inside a cell to regulate its behavior in a desired fashion. For example, the students may be asked to program a cell to produce a precursor for a valuable chemical or to function as a cellular photomemory system."
Caltech will support several existing programs with the grant money as well, including the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, which has operated since 1979 to provide undergraduates with opportunities to work on research projects in Caltech laboratories over a ten-week period. The HHMI funds will be used for SURF stipends in the biological and chemical sciences, with a particular emphasis on supporting women and minority students.
The HHMI funds will also be used to support the MURF program, which was created in 1991 and has been supported by HHMI since 1992. This program is directed toward giving gifted underrepresented undergraduate students from other universities summer research experiences in Caltech laboratories.
The final component of the HHMI grant will provide funding for two outreach programs. The first of these programs, the California Classroom Connection (CCC) is a student-run organization that started in 2002. The CCC matches Caltech students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff volunteers with teachers in the area's public schools for enhancement of science instruction in grades 6-12. With a current average of 13 volunteers, the CCC will be able to expand to about three dozen participants over the four-year period of the grant. The other outreach program is the new Caltech Research Connection (CRC), which will bring approximately 15 students from public high schools into Caltech labs to conduct research.
In announcing the grant, HHMI president Thomas R. Cech said, "We believe it is vital to bring fresh perspectives to the teaching of established scientific disciplines and to develop novel courses in emerging areas, such as computational biology, genomics, and bioimaging."
