The University of Richmond was among 48 universitiues to receive money from The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. UR will get $1.4 million towards its teaching computer science to introductory science course students.

A year ago, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute issued a challenge to 224 undergraduate colleges nationwide: identify creative new ways to engage your students in the biological sciences.

Now 48 of the nation’s best undergraduate institutions will receive $60 million to help them usher in a new era of science education.

[via]

Computational Tie Binds Interdisciplinary Classes

If you want to see the big picture in science, you’ve got to learn to crunch the numbers. That’s a theme at the University of Richmond, where faculty funded by a $1.4 million HHMI grant are teaching computer science in their introductory science courses.

“We’ve found that students who don’t have at least a rudimentary background in programming are at a real disadvantage,” says HHMI grant director Kathy Hoke, a mathematician. “The ties that bind disciplines tend to be computational.”

The faculty at this Richmond, Va., institution aim to expose students to computer science and more in a new, two-semester course that replaces standard introductory classes in computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, and math. Instead of learning these subjects in isolation, students will approach them in an interdisciplinary way. Students will use their programming skills to investigate pertinent science questions, such as modeling key HIV proteins and analyzing their ability to bind to inhibitory drugs. That class will prepare students for upper-level courses in each field, which they can pursue from their sophomore years onward.

“We want our students to think algorithmically,” Hoke explains, saying it will better prepare the students for a career in science. “And we’ll structure the class so they learn to answer questions like this by drawing from different perspectives, such as molecular biology, thermodynamic analysis, and mathematical modeling.”

The emphasis on computation is also reflected in newly-offered courses in bioinformatics, biophysics, computational science, neuropharmacology, and systems biology. Hoke says these subjects all combine elements from multiple fields; progress in each one is dependent on the use of databases and quantitative methods. Systems biology, for instance, draws heavily on genomics and molecular biology, which are data-intensive fields.

The same can be said for epidemiology, which looks for medical trends in human populations. Using its HHMI grant, Richmond is adding a new faculty member in epidemiology this year. “Epidemiology draws on multiple disciplines, and it’s an area that we currently don’t have expertise in,” Hoke says. “And we’ve found that questions about disease really engage students from a variety of different majors.”