Curricular and Pedagogical Innovations in Quantitative Biology

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Current undergraduate biological sciences curricula do not provide adequate computational / quantitative training for students who are interested in pursuing careers in biomedical research. Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) will address this lack of training by broadening and implementing a curricular transformation in biology and related sciences begun during its Phase I project, named the Quantitative Biology (QuBi) initiative. QuBi's interdisciplinary faculty panel's first aim will integrate computational and quantitative biology content into 26 different courses serving approximately 6,500 registrants per year across the Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics departments. Several of these modified courses will introduce our undergraduates to the field of bioinformatics, and QuBi anticipates that up to 20 students per year will pursue the new bioinformatics options and concentrations developed during Phase I. QuBi's second aim is to establish an enduring educational infrastructure for producing quantitative biologists at Hunter by training our science faculty in new pedagogical approaches such as problem-based learning (PBL), collaborative course development and collaborative teaching. Our faculty will attend educational conferences and participate in summer workshops run by pedagogical experts. All knowledge acquired during this initiative will be shared with faculty across Hunter. QuBi's third aim, to build a critical mass of quantitative biology students, is vital for the success of the Phase II project. The QuBi team will collaborate with the College's existing successful science-related educational programs (MARC, MBRS/RISE, HHMI, NSF CSEMS and CollegeNow) for student outreach at both the high school and the college level. The success of the proposed curricular transformation at Hunter College will have a major impact on increasing the number of quantitatively trained biologists, especially minority scientists, at Hunter and across CUNY, since the Hunter curricular activities will be shared with other CUNY campuses. Relevance to Public Health: The amount of biological information available today, such as human genome sequences and health statistics, is increasing exponentially. The computational and quantitative sciences are therefore playing an increasingly important role in disease prevention and treatment. The proposed project will produce a future generation of scientists with the quantitative skills required for biomedical research in the 21st century.