This award to the University of Tampa will support the attendance of 25 graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows and 10 community college faculty at a four-day conference. The conference is one of a series of education symposia organized under the auspices of the American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (ASBMB) 2017 Special Symposia Series: Transforming Education. It will be held at the University of Tampa on July 20-23, 2017. The conference brings together experienced teachers from four-year and two-year colleges and younger scientists who lack teaching experience. There are two major goals. The first is to facilitate the development of the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as teachers through sessions at the conference and by matching them with a dedicated mentor with whom they will continue to interact after the meeting. The second is to highlight teaching approaches that will increase the retention and success of students transferring from two-year to four-year colleges. A report of the conference proceedings will be published in the ASBMB Today journal, in print and online and submitted for publication to the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education (BAMBED) Journal.
The conference is designed to address two issues in life sciences education. The first is the lack of experience of young scientists in teaching and the second is the lower graduation rates of students transferring from two to four-year colleges. The first problem stems from the fact that most graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, in biochemistry and molecular biology, are heavily focused on their research and have little opportunity to gain knowledge about current life sciences pedagogical approaches or develop their teaching skills. Exposing these young scientists to modern approaches in the conference sessions and providing them with long-term mentors will positively impact their professional developmental and better prepare them for teaching. To address the differential graduation rates of transfer students, the conference will include community college faculty and faculty from four-year institutions. Together the faculty will discuss pedagogical methods aimed at improving the success of students. The following topics will form the core of these discussions: 1) High impact teaching strategies; 2) Classroom undergraduate research experiences (CUREs); 3) Molecular visualization in biochemistry & molecular biology pedagogy; 4) Teaching Sanger sequencing for conceptual understanding; 5) Scientific teaching & assessment; 6) Online assessment tools; 7) Community college into 4-year college/university transitions.Â
More information about the conference is available by visiting  www.asbmb.org/SpecialSymposia/2017/education/program/ or by contacting the PI (Dr. Michael Carastro mcarastro@ut.edu).
