Intellectual Merit. The Hopkins Microbiology Course (http://hmc.stanford.edu) is an intensive, 4-week course, targeting microbiology students, who seek to obtain an integrated view of microbial life. The course also attracts non-microbiologists, such as physicists or engineers who want to understand microbial biology in order to begin molecular and population level studies. As a "big picture" course, the Hopkins Microbiology Course requires students to have already acquired a significant background in microbiology. While details are important and stressed abundantly as required, the emphasis is on providing the intellectual framework to weave together multiple disciplines into an integrated perspective. This integration is further intensified by providing students with an introduction and hands-on use of biocomputational tools and methods to exploit large biological data sets in order to obtain new biological understandings. Such a broad view is important for students entering not only the academic environment, but also professional fields that involve microbes (chemical, pharmaceutical, or environmental and water industry).
Broader Impacts. This advanced level summer course seeks to provide students with an integrated conceptual framework and experimental tools necessary to understand and study how the interplay of physiology, ecology, evolution, and population genetics causes and maintains diversity of microbes in diverse environments. The course emphasizes a critical, cross-disciplinary integration and application of the knowledge gained and experimental skills learned.
