FOR FURTHER
INFORMATION:

Jennifer Donovan
(301) 215-8859
donovanj@hhmi.org
Howard Hughes
Medical Institute
4000 Jones Bridge Road, Chevy Chase, MD 20815-6789
(301) 215-8500

Undergraduate biology education is in the midst of a revolution, and 44 research universities will receive $80 million from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to help them address the challenges of a rapidly changing and increasingly interdisciplinary science. The grants will support programs that encourage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to hone their teaching skills. Other programs will bring emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics and computational biology into the undergraduate curriculum and encourage minorities to pursue careers in science.

The four-year grants to universities in 28 states and the District of Columbia range from $1.2 million to $2.2 million each. A panel of scientists and educators reviewed proposals from 189 institutions.

“Biology is progressing so rapidly and interfacing with so many other disciplines that undergraduate teaching runs the risk of substituting quantity for quality,” says HHMI President Thomas R. Cech, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist. “Through these grants, the Institute is providing resources to help universities bring their undergraduate science teaching up to the level of their research programs.”

The dichotomy between research and teaching concerns Peter J. Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs. “One barrier to linking research and education is the lack of opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows—who are the future professors—to acquire teaching skills and experience,” says Bruns, who was a professor of biology at Cornell University before he joined HHMI.

The new grants support programs that can become models for bringing undergraduate teaching and research closer together, as well as exposing undergraduates to emerging fields in biology and to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the life sciences. They also support efforts to attract minorities to science and to encourage them to choose scientific careers. Programs include interdisciplinary laboratory courses in areas such as bioinformatics, proteomics and tissue engineering, as well as new faculty, laboratory equipment, curriculum development and student research opportunities.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biological Sciences Education Program 2002 Grant Awards
Institution	Location	Amount
California Institute of Technology	Pasadena, CA	$1.8 million
Carnegie Mellon University	Pittsburgh, PA	$2.2 million
Case Western Reserve University	Cleveland, OH	$1.2 million
Clemson University	Clemson, SC	$1.8 million
College of William and Mary	Williamsburg, VA	$1.6 million
Cornell University	Ithaca, NY	$1.9 million
Duke University	Durham, NC	$1.8 million
Emory University	Atlanta, GA	$1.8 million
Florida State University	Tallahassee, FL	$1.6 million
George Washington University	Washington, DC	$1.7 million
Georgetown University	Washington, DC	$2.2 million
Harvard University	Cambridge, MA	$1.6 million
Indiana University at Bloomington	Bloomington, IN	$2.2 million
The Johns Hopkins University	Baltimore, MD	$2.2 million
Kansas State University	Manhattan, KS	$1.6 million
Louisiana State University and A&M College	Baton Rouge, LA	$1.8 million
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Cambridge, MA	$2 million
Montana State University	Bozeman, MT	$1.9 million
New York University	New York, NY	$1.7 million
North Carolina State University	Raleigh, NC	$1.6 million
Oklahoma State University Main Campus	Stillwater, OK	$1.6 million
Oregon State University	Corvallis, OR	$1.9 million
Princeton University	Princeton, NJ	$1.9 million
Purdue University	West Lafayette, IN	$2 million
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	Troy, NY	$1.2 million
Stanford University	Stanford, CA	$2 million
State University of New York at Stony Brook	Stony Brook, NY	$1.9 million
Texas Tech University	Lubbock, TX	$2 million
University of Alabama	Tuscaloosa, AL	$1.8 million
University of Arizona	Tucson, AZ	$1.8 million
University of California, Berkeley	Berkeley, CA	$1.2 million
University of California, Los Angeles	Los Angeles, CA	$2 million
University of Chicago	Chicago, IL	$1.2 million
University of Colorado at Boulder	Boulder, CO	$2.2 million
University of Delaware	Newark, DE	$1.7 million
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Urbana, IL	$1.7 million
University of Maryland Baltimore County	Baltimore, MD	$2 million
University of Maryland	College Park, MD	$1.8 million
University of Miami	Coral Gables, FL	$2.1 million
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities	Minneapolis, MN	$1.7 million
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Chapel Hill, NC	$1.6 million
University of Washington	Seattle, WA	$2.2 million
Washington University	St. Louis, MO	$2.2 million
Yale University	New Haven, CT	$2.1 million

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