As one of the largest producers of life-sciences graduates in the country, UC Davis is well positioned to change the culture of biology in the United States. And with a $436,000 NIH Roadmap grant, Professor Martin Wilson plans to do just that.

The Roadmap proposal is the first from UC Davis to receive funding and is one of only two awards nationwide that focus exclusively on undergraduate education. Biological Sciences is the largest major on campus.

The application was made stronger and more competitive through support from the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and the Division of Biological Sciences, which allowed faculty to begin developing the curriculum.

"This is a highly exciting success for the campus as a whole and surely contributes to goals related to both learning and discovery in our vision document," said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw. "I congratulate everyone involved in securing this first NIH Roadmap funding - yet another example of UC Davis being 'on the rise.'"

New vision for medical research

Having spent two years developing an innovative and updated core curriculum for the division, Wilson recognized that the campus's vision dovetailed with new initiatives at the National Institutes of Health.

When Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., became the new director of the NIH in 2002, he started a process of assessment and change that led to the creation of the Roadmap initiative, a vision for a more collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to medical research.

"The Roadmap is about changing the way this country conducts medical research and delivers benefits to patients," stated Wilson. "A key part of this vision is to produce biologists that are more quantitatively savvy."

According to Wilson, biology students have typically avoided linear algebra, statistics, calculus, physics and computer sciences. But, he says, these are exactly the disciplines that are the foundation of contemporary biological science.

"Students should make a meaningful connection between biology and the quantitative sciences," he said. "Biology is largely taught as a qualitative science, and the skills students acquire in their calculus classes, for example, are seldom if ever employed in the context of biology. Little wonder that students get the idea that quantitative material is alien to biology."

Creating a new kind of scientist

For example, Wilson said, "a CAT-scan, now a routine medical procedure, is based on a piece of math that allows a computer to reconstruct a two-dimensional image of internal organs. How many biologists could tell you how this works?"

To address the dramatic changes not just in medical science but the whole of biology over the past 10 years and to help undergraduates develop "interdigitated" skills, Wilson defined two goals for his Roadmap proposal: 1) to cultivate a substantial cadre of students with advanced skills in both biology on the one hand and mathematics, engineering, chemistry, computer science or physics on the other; and 2) to make all biology students more facile with quantitative material.

Wilson's Roadmap proposal will address these goals by:

• Developing a new lower-division class called "Modeling in Biology." This course will teach students how to use Mathcad, a software program designed to do the "heavy lifting" of numerical simulations. The course will be offered as a pilot in the fall of 2004, with the goal of teaching 2,500 students per year by full scale-up.
• Introducing quantitative material into existing intermediate-level courses. Students in these classes will have already taken a year of calculus and physics and should be able to apply Mathcad to more complex quantitative problems. Carole Hom, an award-winning instructor who has extensive experience teaching mathematics to biology undergraduates, will be developing the curriculum to include models involving predator/prey interactions and conduction of nerve impulses, for example, as well as material from evolution, physiology and molecular biology.
• Launching a minor degree in Quantitative Biology and Bioinformatics by the spring of 2005. This minor will serve students majoring in either biology or a mathematical or physical science and complement their coursework with interdisciplinary studies. "A minor like this will make students highly employable," Wilson said.
• Placing advanced undergraduates in faculty labs, where they will work with faculty mentors in interdisciplinary teams (e.g., a student from computer science with a molecular biology student) on real science problems.

Curriculum redux

Most of Wilson's Roadmap grant will support the new curriculum development over the next five years. Faculty will be asked for material from their classes, which Hom will then develop as quantitative problems.

"Changing the curriculum at a large university is a huge and complicated undertaking, and most institutions try to avoid it for as long as they can," said Wilson, who chaired the committee to revise the DBS core curriculum. "Under the leadership of Dean Phyllis Wise, however, UC Davis is leading the pack in undergraduate education of biologists, and we're going to make this as easy as possible for the faculty."

Wise said the change represents "a great team effort, led by Martin, that includes faculty from several colleges and divisions."

"It shows our commitment to developing innovative and modern curricula for our undergraduate students," she said.

Other faculty agree. Richard Grosberg, professor of evolution and ecology, said many of the objectives of agriculture and environmental sciences have a highly quantitative component, including wildlife and fisheries management questions, land-use planning, pathogens and disease, environmental economics, genealogy reconstruction and identification using molecular genetics (i.e., fingerprinting).

"You name it," said Grosberg. "Every aspect of the life sciences is becoming highly quantitative, in part because of our unprecedented capacity to generate large amounts of useful data, but also because the goal of integrating across disciplines in the life sciences is finally becoming possible. The kinds of questions we can address are enormously complex, and require the most powerful quantitative tools. If our students don't have those mathematical, computational and statistical tools, and are not comfortable applying them to solving biological problems, then we are not doing our job as educators. The Roadmap project, in my opinion, is the foundation of our effort to make our undergraduate biology core achieve that goal."

Creating enthusiasm for research

When asked what inspired him to write the proposal, Wilson said, "More than anything, I love being in the lab. This was a way that I could help generate that enthusiasm in the next generation of scientists."

A neuroscientist researching the way synapses function in the retina, Wilson recently discovered the trigger that causes synapses to release transmitters. "We've found that calcium ions actually reside within the synapses rather than outside," he explained. "This is significant because we really understand very little about how synapses work."

And just as synapses transmit nerve impulses from one cell to another, Wilson and his colleagues hope to transfer information more efficiently from scientist to scientist, charting a new roadmap for the biological sciences.

— By freelance writer Eden Dabbs, whose work also has appeared in UC Davis Magazine.