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Chemical Attractants: Recruiting and Retaining Underrepresented and Disadvantaged Groups and First-Year Students in Science
Summary: Irving Epstein's primary research interests lie in the area of nonlinear chemical dynamics. His HHMI project has two aims: to develop a rigorous precollege program for inner-city and other high school students who are underrepresented in science, with the goal of having them major in science at Brandeis University, and to revamp the introductory chemistry course so that it includes more activities to spark students' interest in this subject.
Project Summary
We propose two projects aimed at recruiting and retaining students in the sciences. The first focuses on underrepresented and disadvantaged groups in science and seeks to build on the achievements of the Posse Foundation of New York City in selecting, preparing, and supporting inner-city youth to succeed at 23 colleges and universities. Groups of 10 New York public high school students will be selected for their scientific interest, ability, and potential, based not only on the usual grades and standardized test scores but also on interviews, problem-solving exercises, and other nontraditional criteria to be constructed in conjunction with the Posse Foundation. We will develop a network of high school teachers who will help identify potential candidates for the program.
During their senior year of high school, the students who are chosen will participate in eight months of weekly workshops and a two-week summer “boot camp.” These activities are aimed at strengthening the academic, team-building, social, time-management, and other skills every student will need to persist and succeed in science at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, the students in this “science posse” will meet regularly, as a group and individually, with a mentor—a young scientist who will serve both as an adviser and a role model. Students will be provided with laptops and offered summer internships in Brandeis labs and at local hospitals.
The second project seeks to redesign the general chemistry course, the entry point for the vast majority of science and premedical students at most American universities. The goal of this project is to regenerate the sense of excitement and wonder about natural phenomena that brings students to science initially. To do this, the course will be restructured to devote more class time to lecture demonstrations, films, historical and real-world examples, computer simulations, and games and to relate these activities to what is happening in the associated laboratory course.
While the traditional lecture and problem-solving aspects of the course will be kept, the underlying premise is that motivating the students to want to read the textbook and grapple with the concepts is a more effective use of class time than simply laying out the material to a passive, and often captive, audience. Exercises that encourage students to pursue scientific questions further by exploring them outside of class, such as solving challenging problems structured around computer games or analyzing the water from the campus pond, will be emphasized. Materials developed will be made available via the Internet to other institutions interested in adopting this approach.
Research Summary
Our primary research interests lie in the area of nonlinear chemical dynamics. Our laboratory focuses on patterns in time and space that arise in chemical reactions in media in which the reacting species may also diffuse. Phenomena of interest include periodic concentration oscillations, chemical chaos, traveling waves, and spatially periodic stationary (Turing) patterns. Nearly all of these behaviors are seen not only in the relatively simple chemical reactions studied by our group, but in living systems as well. We seek to build new systems that exhibit spatiotemporal patterns; to unveil the existence of new types of patterns; and to understand, often by using mathematical models and computer simulation, how such phenomena can arise. One goal of this work is to shed light on the more complex patterns exhibited by cells and organisms.
Because patterns are ubiquitous in all fields, this work has applications to, and makes use of techniques from, a wide variety of disciplines beyond chemistry, including biology, physics, mathematics, engineering, materials science, and even the social sciences. A related area of current research is the study of the dynamical behavior of networks of interacting units, which may be thought of as chemical reactions, elements of the power grid, cells, or living organisms. Many of the insights and techniques developed in the study of chemical systems can usefully be applied to understanding the properties of such networks.
Last updated September 2006
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