Swarthmore College, founded during the Civil War by Quakers who wanted a coeducational alternative to Haverford College, has always been fertile ground for training scientists. Among liberal arts schools, it was second only to Oberlin College in the number of science Ph.D.s produced between 1920 and 1976. The latest statistics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), for 1996-2002, show that Oberlin and Swarthmore are still first and second.

Some science Ph.D.s, no doubt, are born. But others are made, and a visitor to this campus can practically watch them being hatched in Bio 2—or, more formally, "Biology 002: Introduction to Organismal and Population Biology"—as Julie Hagelin, an expert on how birds use plumage ornamentation to attract mates, lectures on natural selection and how insects decide their optimal group and territory size. Between slides, she peppers the audience with questions. At the lecture's start, Hagelin tosses cotton into an aquarium containing a colleague's Siberian hamsters. At the end of class, she flips a switch so that an overhead camera projects the result of the animals' industry: a cozy nest built of fluffy cotton and pine shavings. While some students slam notebooks and bolt for the exits, others in this class of 100—gargantuan by Swarthmore standards—stream up the aisles for a closer look or to pose additional questions.

Hagelin team-teaches Bio 2 with three other biology professors; each also spends one afternoon a week in the lab with the students. In much the same manner, four other biologists team-teach "Biology 001: Cellular and Molecular Biology" in the fall. Students emerge from this pair of courses not only familiar with biological concepts from genetics to microbiology to ecology to behavior, but also on a first-name basis with most of the biology faculty.

Some students enter Swarthmore with physics or philosophy or political science in mind until Bio 1 or 2 essentially realigns their brain cells. And this is clearly a long-lasting realignment, as almost half of the college's biology majors go on to obtain doctorates in science.

For example, Aaron Strong, now a junior, arrived from Maine thinking about astrophysics, "but that changed the first week I was here." When Hagelin mentioned last year she was looking for students to do summer fieldwork studying crested auklets on an island in the Bering Sea off Alaska, Strong needed no second invitation. "He sent me an e-mail saying, 'I've wanted to go to the Arctic since I was five years old,'" recalls Hagelin. "I could see right away he was passionate about what he does. That's just the kind of student you want at a field site, where things don't always go the right way."

Strong spent winter break at Auburn University in Alabama, learning how to isolate bacterial DNA from bird feathers, and is one of three students working alongside Hagelin this summer on St. Lawrence Island, inhabited by a few hundred Siberian Yup'ik Eskimos and hundreds of thousands of birds, including the crested auklet, a monogamous seabird that produces a tangerine scent during courtship.

The Bio 1 and 2 experience tends to realign faculty brain cells as well, with similarly positive results. These classes are a far cry, says Hagelin, from "the cattle-call courses" at a large state university where she taught as a postdoctoral fellow, "with the cell phones going off and people reading newspapers during class. Here it's almost like they are little goldfish nibbling at my feet, wanting more and more and more."

PARKING EGOS AT THE DOOR
Swarthmore President Alfred H. Bloom says that the college hires faculty with a passion for combining teaching and research, and helps them stay current by granting paid sabbaticals every seventh semester. Professors must tailor their research, however, to fit the fabric of a liberal arts college. "You can't do certain types of projects that require a full graduate team," notes Bloom, "and you can't do projects that require unbelievably costly equipment. But you can do a lot of exciting, important, and innovative interdisciplinary research." Toward that end, the school opened a new $77 million science center this spring.

Biology chair Amy Cheng Vollmer says that Swarthmore faculty are "willing to park their egos at the door" and see their success in their students' triumphs. Physics professor Carl Grossman agrees. "We've developed a culture of making sure our students have research experiences," says Grossman. He chooses experiments for his nonlinear-optics research lab "that combine entry-level work and get students thinking about what they can do in graduate school."

Two recent physics majors were able to extend that thinking on Rhodes scholarships. Matthew Landreman '03 spent two college summers in labs at the University of Minnesota and the Santa Fe Institute, courtesy of the NSF's Research Experience for Undergraduates program; his next two summers were spent in the spheromak (plasma ring) lab of Swarthmore plasma-physics professor Michael R. Brown. Now at Oxford, Landreman remembers not only exciting experiments in the lab, but also "a great number of excellent barbeques" at Brown's home. "I got to know other faculty well, even those with whom I never had a class," he says.

Jacob J. Krich '00 is pursing a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard, after three years studying mathematics during his Oxford sojourn. Krich's mentor was physics professor Peter Collings, who has done pioneering work in liquid crystals. "He explained advanced concepts of physics to me in a wonderful, patient manner," Krich recalls. "He was always a bright spot in the lab. Peter helped me through the hard parts and got me farther than either of us expected." Krich won an Apker Award from the American Physical Society for physics undergraduate research.

Even students who ace advanced placement science are encouraged to take one of the introductory biology courses, if only to hone an ability to write lab reports as though they were being submitted to the journals Cell or Nature. They also do this lab work in groups, says Vollmer, "because complex science problems are solved by teams rather than by single people."

The cutthroat competition often found on college campuses, especially in courses frequented by premeds, is less evident at Swarthmore, says cell biologist Elizabeth A. Vallen: "The kids here are driven internally, but they are amazingly kind and helpful to each other." Not once has a student asked Vallen if a topic covered in class would be on an exam.

"Students get excited any time I talk about what the end of knowledge is," says neurobiologist Kathleen Siwicki. "Our students sense that there's plenty of interesting science to be done"—in her own lab, for example, where she works with Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies. "We study learning and memory, and changes in the brain that are responsible for changes in behavior. We're working at a slower pace, naturally, because the students have lots of other commitments and don't work full-time in the lab," says Siwicki. "The most exciting part of the teaching experience here are those afternoons in seminar. The students select the papers and literature they want to read. Something goes on in those seminars that empowers them to think of themselves as scientists."

Several of Siwicki's students paid tribute to their mentor at the most recent Darwin's birthday party, an annual biology department event, by decorating cupcakes with icing that depicted two Drosophila a-courting.

FRUITS OF RESEARCH
To other institutions wishing to emulate Swarthmore's success at grooming scientists, President Bloom urges them to hire faculty "who treasure the work with undergraduates, and to change the criteria for promotion and tenure so that inspired teaching is rewarded."

Too often, the value of such teaching "is discounted as contrary to the seriousness of a research institution," says Bloom.

Five honors seniors bring their slides one morning to summarize their projects for a visitor. Seeta Sistla plans to pursue a Ph.D., while Stephanie Cross, Emily Ford, Matthew Goldstein, and Renuka Nayak aim to acquire joint M.D.-Ph.D. degrees.

"I'll be over 35 before my first job," says Cross, one of the cupcake decorators. "I knew from the start that I wanted to do biology. But there's a passion here at Swarthmore. It's in the professors and students."

Ford worked with biology professor Colin Purrington on a study of the evolutionary bias of handedness in twining vines; 90 percent of vines advance in a counter-clockwise manner.

In a Stanford lab last summer, Goldstein studied the potential of statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) to suppress proliferation of T cell lymphoma. He is also a left-handed pitcher with a close-to-90-miles-per-hour fastball who cocaptained the Swarthmore baseball squad.

Nayak said studying Drosophila (fruit flies) "helped me see how research is done. It's all about asking questions. I came in really shy. Research has given me more confidence."

Seeta Sistla, of Albany, New York, arrived intending to major in philosophy but was converted by Bio 1 and 2. She hopes to publish with Purrington and plant physiologist Mark Jacobs (now dean of Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University) results of her research on plant vascular regeneration.

—Christopher Connell

Photo: David Graham

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
Summer 2004, pages 10-21.
©2004 Howard Hughes Medical Institute