USM faculty are students for a week

During the first week of August, Dr. Ah-Kau Ng of the Applied Medical Sciences Dept and Drs. Dave Champlin and Lisa Moore of the Biological Sciences Dept attended a workshop called Genomic Approaches in BioSciences to learn more about teaching genomics to undergraduates. The workshop was sponsored by the Cold Spring Harbor's DNA Learning Center and funded through NSF's Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant (see http://www.dnalc.org/programs/teacher_training.html#genomicapp for more info). The workshop lasted all week, during which these three faculty carried out several of the labs that DNA Learning Center offers for high school, community college, and 4 yr college classes, such as silencing genes in small roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans), testing whether or not we were able to taste certain bitter tastes, and barcoding DNA of organisms we collected at the site, as well as exploring new teaching methods of annotating genomes! By attending this workshop, these faculty were exploring new ways to increase genomic education for USM students.