Students in all sections of Ami Ahern-Rindell’s Genetics Lab course presented a Research Poster Symposium on Tuesday, December 8. Posters were presented to fellow students guests including University president Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C.; Tom Greene, provost; CAS dean Michael Andrews, acting assistant provost Lauretta Frederking, and Dan McGinty, director of the Dundon-Berchtold Institute.
The lab course was designed for students to conduct hypothesis-driven research that serves as part of Ahern-Rindell’s scholarly work on an animal model of GM1-Gangliosidosis, a fatal genetic disorder. Students are engaged in creating new knowledge and learning science by doing science, rather than conducting experiments for which the outcome is already known. The benefits of undergraduate research are made available to more students by incorporating it into the classroom curriculum.
Ahern-Rindell received funding for this approach in 1998 from the National Science Foundation and recently contributed a chapter on the design of her Genetics Lab course in a book titled Inquiry-Based Learning for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Programs: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators.
For more information contact Ahern-Rindell at 7137 or ahernrin@up.edu.