Teaching Ourselves and Each Other
Manuel "Manny" Ares always felt he learned more in the lab than in
the classroom. That's why he wants to expose more students to a real
research environment.
"If people who have not thought of themselves as researchers can be
part of a research team, they end up seeing themselves as scientists,"
says Ares, professor and chair of molecular, cell and developmental
biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Coupled with that is his conviction that the best researchers also
make the best teachers. So Ares' vision is to nurture not just future
scientists, but future teachers as well.
"Research is the act of teaching ourselves, an act that is very
similar to teaching others," he says. "As all researchers are teachers
of themselves, it follows that the best researchers ought to make the
best teachers."
But "too often in academia there is unnecessary competition between
teaching and research," he adds. "Those trained and well-versed in
research techniques often have little incentive to participate in
teaching."
As an HHMI Professor, Ares will design new courses for
undergraduates that help students to begin thinking of themselves as
teacher-scientists. The undergraduate research group "will act as an
interdisciplinary research team in which both learning and teaching
take place," he says.
He also will introduce students to the skills involved in using
computers and robotics to look at gene expression. "Normally,
undergraduates don't get experience in this until after they graduate,"
he says.
Students will work in his lab, which focuses on the mechanisms and
regulation of genetic splicing. Splicing is required to remove intron
sequences from pre-mRNA and create coding sequences for
translation.
"We want to know how information that's in genes gets retrieved by
the cell," he says. "It's a mysterious process. The cell needs to
figure out: How do I interpret my genes? It's a big part of the puzzle
of the genome."
He uses yeast for these studies "because it offers simple, powerful
genetic approaches and has a splicing machinery similar to that in
mammalian cells," he says. "In addition, the yeast genome is completely
sequenced, the location of nearly every intron is known, and genes for
most splicing factors have been identified. This provides unique
advantages for the study of splicing."
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