Dr. Michael Wolyniak, Associate Professor of Biology, is one of five principal investigators on a $50,000 grant just awarded by the National Science Foundation to develop a national mentoring program for promoting active learning practices among undergraduate faculty in the life sciences.  Dr. Wolyniak’s involvement stems from his work with the Education Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB).  The ASCB will administer the grant along with the Genetics Society of America (GSA) and the American Society for Plant Biology (ASPB).  The principal investigators on the one-year grant will be representatives of the three societies as well as faculty from Hampden-Sydney, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The initiative, Promoting Active Learning and Mentoring (PALM), seeks to promote best teaching practices as recommended by Vision and Change, a 2011 report of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  PALM will allow faculty and postdoctoral fellows to gain hands-on experience and long-term mentorship (at least one semester) in bringing evidence-based, effective active learning strategies into their own classrooms. PALM Fellows will pair with mentors who have already reformed their classrooms, visit their mentors to observe and participate in redesigned classes, and develop an active learning based model for one of their classes with guidance from their mentors. As a pilot to the PALM network, Dr. Wolyniak hosted Dr. Sricharan Murugesan from the National Institutes of Health in his Fall 2014 Molecular and Cellular Biology class where he engaged Hampden-Sydney students in laboratory work related to his own NIH research on actin cable dynamics in mammalian cells. Dr. Murugesan will return to Hampden-Sydney in Fall 2015 to continue this work with Dr. Wolyniak’s Genetics and Cell Biology class.