Providing effective and engaging laboratory experiences is an important part of the effort to improve undergraduate biology education. Introducing current and cutting-edge topics to undergraduate students keeps them excited and brings relevance to the material being studied. The rapidly emerging technology of genomic engineering using programmable nucleases like the CRISPR-Cas9 system is a topic that is both scientifically exciting and socially relevant. As CRISPR-Cas9 continues its meteoric rise into mainstream molecular biology, it is essential for students to learn how to work with it. To that end, this award will support a four-day workshop at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities that builds on the momentum of a similar project in 2018. The overall goal of the conference organizers is to expand the development and propagation of effective CRISPR-Cas9 tools across multiple model systems.
At the conference a group of "veterans" from the 2018 workshop will join CRISPR-Cas9 experts across several popular model systems to work with a new cohort of undergraduate-focused instructors towards three objectives. The first is to foster "big sibling/little sibling" working groups between 2018 workshop alumni and new 2019 participants that can sustain the experiences from the workshop. The second is to share the successful implementation efforts of participants from the 2018 workshop, improve previously implemented pedagogical modules, and create new ones beyond the scope of the original zebrafish workflow suitable to different types of classrooms/labs. Finally, the conference will continue to foster and provide support to the undergraduate educators to disseminate gene engineering/editing technologies and make innovations to their classrooms/labs. The long-term goal of this workshop is to form small, regional groups of experienced and new instructors that can support each other both locally and nationally and to develop online resources that will allow these groups to publicly share their insights with the education community.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
