Professor David Walt will be giving an HHMI Education Group Seminar Friday, February 17th @ 3 pm. We hope that you will be able to join us for this event.
Seminar Topic: Research as a Goal of Education and Education as a Goal of Research
Seminar Date & Time: Friday, February 17th @ 3:00 pm
Location: Whitehead Institute Auditorium
Professor David Walt is a Robinson Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Professor of Oral Medicine at Tufts University and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. As an HHMI Professor, he engages undergraduates in developing multi-year research projects. Undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers in the Walt Laboratory also design experiments for high school students and assist in training high school science teachers. Professor Walt’s goal is to share contemporary, engaging science with students who ordinarily would not encounter it.
During the talk, Professor Walt will describe two open-ended experiments designed by teams of undergraduate students. He will also describe the team of Tufts students, faculty, staff, and high school science teachers and administrators who pilot-tested and implemented these week-long experiments in 11 classrooms, and the results from high school students’ written assessments and feedback from the team. Professor Walt is also the Lead Professor of a science distribution course for non-science majors entitled “From the Big Bang to Humankind”. Walt started this interdisciplinary team-taught course that explores the origin and fate of the universe, the formation of Earth and its structure, the chemistry of life, the evolution and development of complex organisms, and the onset of modern humans. The course is designed to demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of science, and to allow students to both reinforce and augment their knowledge of science through learning about the evolution of the universe. The course enrolls over 100 students each year. During the talk, Professor Walt will discuss the complexities of establishing and sustaining a truly interdisciplinary course, and will share evidence of student learning gains from the student assessment “Five Big Questions about the Universe”.
Refreshments will be provided.
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