HHMI: Paul Lipton & Meredith Knight

HHMI Group Meeting:

Paul Lipton and Meredith Knight

Title: Bridging the Gap, from Classroom to Bench

Group Meeting Date & Time: Friday, January 24, 2014 @ 2:00 pm

Location: Koch Institute auditorium (76-156, small conference room at the back of the auditorium)

Dr. Paul Lipton is the Director of Boston University’s Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience, and Program Director for BU’s HHMI Undergraduate Science Education Program. He is a founding member of the major, and has overseen its growth from 30 students at its inception in the fall of 2008, to almost 350 students today. Paul is the primary academic advisor for the major. He teaches and develops new lecture and lab courses for the program, oversees a set of High School Outreach programs targeted at students enrolled in the Boston Public Schools, serves as faculty advisor to the Mind and Brain Society, and publishes their student magazine, The Nerve. Formerly an active member of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurobiology (headed by Professor Howard Eichenbaum, Director of the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience), Paul’s research was focused on the neural circuitry of learning and memory. Paul is currently working on incorporating new pedagogies into the curriculum and, together with Meredith Knight (a doctoral student in Boston University’s School of Education), validating assessment methods for the program’s new courses and curricular revisions.

Meredith Thompson Knight is a science educator and educational researcher with a foundation in science and educational research techniques. She has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Cornell University, a master’s degree in science and engineering education from Tufts University, and is currently a doctoral candidate in science education at Boston University. She has experience both in laboratory research and in education research, and has learned first hand that education research can be challenging because “people are not petri dishes!”. She has conducted education research as part of a team for a large-scale, national studies, and has experience designing and implementing a number of smaller scale evaluations for educational programs at the K-16 level. She has served as the program evaluator for the HHMI sponsored neuroscience program at BU since Fall of 2011, and has enjoyed the opportunity to think about learning from a neuroscience perspective.