University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez
Island Campus Reworks Biology Curriculum to Incorporate Research

Professor Nico Franz shows undergraduate students at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez how to catch tropical flies and wasps with an insect net in the tropical rainforest El Yunque. With its HHMI grant, the school will take pictures of the insects students catch and produce interactive keys to the species to benefit the general zoology courses.

With 1,300 undergraduates enrolled in biology courses at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, the faculty was overwhelmed trying to provide hands-on research opportunities for students. Thanks to a new $1.4 million HHMI science education grant, project director Nanette Diffoot believes they are headed toward a possible solution.

"Our special research course only reached 100 students a year, so we decided to use our entire 2008 HHMI grant to restructure regular courses in the curriculum to include short research projects and teach laboratory skills," Diffoot said.

The university's courses in general biology, genetics, botany, zoology, microbiology, immunology, and cell biology all have laboratory components that contain an average of 13 exercises per semester. The new curriculum will pare down these exercises and use the freed time to allow students to create and carry out short research projects. These projects will focus on plants and organisms native to Puerto Rico, including local cassava, invertebrates, and microbial habitats.

"We're starting with the basic classes and working our way up the curriculum," Diffoot said. "All our science majors should have more than one research experience before they graduate."

Choosing the subject of their research and designing experiments will increase students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills and help them become acquainted with current scientific issues. Students will gain firsthand experience with many of the tools that drive today's foremost scientific research: protein and genome fingerprinting, digital scientific imaging, plant tissue culture, bioinformatics, and modern molecular genetic practices.

Students that participate in these research projects will generate data and insights that will merit future publications in journals, on the college's web site, and in local and national educational presentations.

The university's new approach to its biology curriculum will begin with its courses, but will eventually expand into other programs. For example, high school teachers, undergraduates in the biology teacher training program, and adjunct professors who teach beginning and intermediate undergraduate courses will learn about local research projects that will enhance their curriculum.

"Through HHMI, we hope to enrich the lives of our college students and the high school students on our island in ways that weren't possible before." Diffoot said.

Photo: Sohath Zamira Yusseff Vanegas