Skip to main content

New Howard Hughes Grant Offers Undergraduates Different Perspective for Learning and Research in Life Sciences

Duke will use the grant to support activities that encourage students to see the biological world as sets of systems to be explored by interdisciplinary groups using tools that include mathematics and statistics

Rising senior Felicia Walton works in genetics and microbiology laboratory

At a time when Duke is revising what and how it teaches life sciences majors, the university has won a four-year $1.9 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to strengthen both science education and research during undergraduate years.

Duke will use the grant to support activities that encourage students to see the biological world as sets of systems to be explored by interdisciplinary groups using tools that include mathematics and statistics, according to Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College and principal investigator of the new grant.

"We've had tremendous advances in fields like molecular biology, but it also is necessary to study phenomena at the systems level," Thompson said. "When we're raising systems-level questions, we need a wider range of disciplines working together.

"We don't need just biologists," he said. "We also need the engineer, the physicist, the mathematician and the chemist."

In fostering such broader perspective, the new grant will build on a 2002 HHMI grant to Duke that provided $1.8 million for bolstering undergraduate classroom and laboratory experiences in the area of genomics.

Among its plans, Duke will use the grant to create a Hughes Vertically Integrated Partners (VIP) program to enable rising juniors and seniors to participate in 10 weeks of summer research work with interdisciplinary teams of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students.

The research projects will use the systems approach to explore five areas: cell systems, modeling, genomics, signal processing and the evolution of complex systems.

VIP will continue and expand the current HHMI Research Fellows Program. This program, which specifically targets women and underrepresented minorities, gives students who have completed their first year at Duke the opportunity to work for eight weeks during the summer in campus research laboratories.

The Research Fellows Program gave Felicia Walton -- who came to Duke from Asheville, N.C., with no research experience -- a chance to work during her first summer in the laboratory of Joseph Heitman, a professor of molecular biology and genetics.

Still working there in the summer before her senior year, Walton is using genetic tools to explore ways to combat a pathogen that infects humans whose immune systems have been damaged by diseases such as HIV/AIDS or by chemotherapy.

"I think it's the most useful kind of learning for a biology student," Walton said of her research, which she conducts under the mentorship of postdoctoral scientist Alexander Idnurm. "By working in a lab, you're really learning how to solve problems, and at the same time you're contributing to the body of knowledge of all scientists. So you learn not just facts but also skills."

Walton is the first author of two research papers from Heitman's lab, and she recently delivered a talk on her research at the American Society of Microbiology's annual meeting.

Duke also will use the grant to develop a Hughes Summer Science Network that will offer lectures and other activities for all undergraduates participating in summer-break research projects. In addition, the university will develop new courses and course materials for various stages of undergraduate training in biology that will emphasize systems perspectives and the increasing need for computation and crossdisciplinary expertise.

The philosophy behind the HHMI grant melds with the thinking of Duke faculty members who are in the midst of revising how they teach the life sciences to undergraduates, said Philip Benfey, a molecular biologist and professor who chairs the Biology Department.

"With the advent of genomics, it has become clear to most people in the field that life scientists increasingly need a strong quantitative background at all levels of analysis," he said. "Some of our most important collaborations are now with people in mathematics, computer science and engineering. We cannot do the science we are doing without these collaborations.

Huntington F. Willard, director of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and an HHMI professor, said the new grant's focus on systems biology and interdisciplinary investigation is "an appropriate transition" from activities supported by the 2002 HHMI grant.

The 2002 grant led to "an explosive interest in genomics on the part of undergraduates," Willard said.

"The new grant," he said, "will bring a new approach to science that is much more comprehensive and encompassing, much more data-intensive and much more digital."

Duke was among 50 universities receiving HHMI undergraduate science education grants totaling $86.4 million. Based in Chevy Chase, Md., HHMI is a nonprofit medical research organization; additional information about its latest grants is available online

.