The nearly 200 educators from across the country who gathered this week at �ֲ���ý College for the Gordon Research Conference came to share new research on ways to make biology education more inclusive, diverse, and accessible in a setting aimed at fostering intense and intimate collaboration.

After just one day, �ֲ���ý Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks, one of two dozen speakers at the conference, said they were already there: “We’re really feeding off each other. The nerd energy here is at an all-time high right now.”

In all, �ֲ���ý had three professors contributing at the national conference, which reflects well on the college’s growing reputation for “doing a lot of work now on how we talk about power and privilege across all majors,” said Carrie Diaz Eaton, �ֲ���ý associate professor of digital and computational studies and one of the conference’s co-chairs.

April Hill, who is the college’s Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM, also presented at the conference about a �ֲ���ý team studying ways to make STEM more inclusive, research funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Hill’s talk focused on course and curriculum reform across STEM disciplines and how equity and justice can be used as guiding principles. 

Offered at �ֲ���ý and 19 venues in North America, Europe, and Asia, Gordon conferences are regarded as premier scientific gatherings.

“We are very proud of our faculty contributing to a gathering of some of the best educators in the world as the community explores ways to promote excellence in undergraduate biology education through social justice,” said Malcolm Hill, �ֲ���ý vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “It is a point of pride to host the conference at �ֲ���ý, and even more so to have these fantastic colleagues as part of our community.”

This summer, �ֲ���ý will play host to seven Gordon conferences on a dazzling array of topics, such as chronobiology, cerebellum, and photochemistry, in addition to undergraduate biology education, which has been offered at �ֲ���ý twice before since being added to the GRC roster in 2015 as a biennial conference.

As co-chair of this year’s edition, Diaz Eaton aimed to gather at the GRC a wide range of experts on the subject — specifically researchers from marginalized communities. 

“I really want to see and oftentimes use the voices of the people who have been marginalized in STEM education and oppressed historically, and challenge the community to start new conversations,” Diaz Eaton said.

“The folks we invited to be on stage are its own kind of display of voices that matter. There are a variety of individuals here sharing research and practice also grounded in their social identities and experiences that we wanted to make sure are lifted up in the conversation.”

The goal of the five-day conference — one of seven held by GRC around the world this year — was to challenge the 185 participants to critique themselves as well as their colleagues as they sought new ways to teach biology more inclusively, said Stanley Lo, a lecturer at the University of California San Diego and Diaz Eaton’s fellow co-chair.

The conference featured two dozen speakers who presented unpublished research in seminars that ran into the night. Afternoon sessions in Perry Atrium resulted in informal small-group discussions about new research that was shared by participants on posters. Yellow and pink sticky notes on the posters provided feedback from educators from as far away as Utah, Arizona, Oregon, and California.  

The fact that many of the symposium’s speakers were members of the marginalized groups they studied made their research more authentic and compelling, said Sam Long, a high school biology teacher and transgender man who came from Denver to speak about gender-inclusive education.

Long helped to found a group called Gender Inclusive Biology, a trio of trans and non-binary high school and middle school biology teachers who train educators to be more inclusive in representing gender, sex and sexuality. He relished the opportunity to collaborate and network with others studying equality in STEM — as well as the chance to speak about his own work.

Long is also a wheelchair user, and so he faces a number of barriers to access and inclusion in society.

“If I were to teach my students that people with XX chromosomes are women and people with X and Y chromosomes are men, that is oversimplified,” Long said. “They already know that doesn’t represent me, let alone all the students in our school or people in our community. Why not give the best science education and teach the complex truth about biology?”

“If students don’t feel well respected in the classroom, they don’t persist in science, and that’s not what we need.”

Lori Banks

Banks said the research shared on the first day of the conference helped her think more critically about how to teach biology in a more inclusive way. She pointed to several unpublished studies that looked specifically at the LGBTQ+ experience and how teachers are serving or not serving that community as examples.

“It’s nice to see the data so we can think about how to update our practices,” Banks said. “I think the biggest thing I’ve seen on a couple of different posters is just the language that we use in classrooms and about creative ways in which we can be more inclusive. If students don’t feel well respected in the classroom, they don’t persist in science, and that’s not what we need.”

As Perry Atrium buzzed late Monday afternoon with educators and scholars sharing ideas, Banks spoke with several colleagues about her work focused on STEM identity. One was Hannah Nichols, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, who was glad to be at this GRC. The mission to make science education more inclusive resonated strongly with her.

“I am a minority in my classroom. I am a Black woman and there are not many Black women in my class — or on my campus, for that matter,” Nichols said. “At the University of Georgia, you’d be very surprised, there aren’t that many. This has made me think about what is going on in my school and in my classrooms.”

“I was struggling,” admitted Loral O’Hara.

The NASA astronaut was explaining, via Zoom, to a class of �ֲ���ý sophomores what they were seeing on her shared screen: a video of O’Hara wearing a huge spacesuit, fumbling around underwater in a large pool, aka NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, Texas.

To paraphrase the famous Apollo saying, O’Hara had a problem: Her safety tether had gotten tangled in some tools right in front of her. 

The tether is needed so “you don’t accidentally become disconnected and float off into space,” she explained. “It’s really important” (yes, astronauts still excel at understatement). Untangling it with hands wearing huge astronaut gloves is “like trying to use oven mitts to untie a knot.” 

At the time, O’Hara was chagrined. But she now knows that it was OK to flub a task when the consequences were low. “I could have made that mistake in orbit someday when the consequences are much higher. Being able to make a mistake, fix it, and laugh about it and learn from it — that’s a really important skill, not just for spacewalks, but also for life.”

It was just the sort of message that Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams and Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks wanted their students, a cohort of impressionable sophomores on the cusp of becoming science majors, to hear. 

These sophomore are STEM Scholars, in the second of a two-year academic program that helps incoming students who are interested in STEM majors begin to think like young scientists, problem-solve like young scientists, and, most of all, believe in themselves as young scientists. 

The program is part of a �ֲ���ý effort to disrupt an old mindset about what it takes to succeed in majors related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM. 

The mindset, entrenched in U.S. higher education for generations, says that having the right stuff for STEM means that you survive while others fail. Indeed, introductory STEM courses are often known as just that: “weed-out” courses.

And while weeding out might be valuable in gardening, finding a great NFL quarterback, or naming the winner of a TV reality show, it’s now understood that weeding out in STEM courses only proves the shortcomings of the teaching model, not the student. 

At �ֲ���ý, that’s changing.

“We don’t believe that certain people can do STEM and certain people can’t,” says April Hill, the Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM. “If you are accepted to �ֲ���ý College, we believe that you are fully capable of not just getting a STEM degree, but thriving along the way.”

STEM Scholars take a year-long First-Year Seminar, then a year-long course sophomore year. This fall’s sophomore course had 30 students, taught in two sections by Williams and Banks. This fall’s first-year STEM seminar was taught by Aleksander Diamond-Stanic (physics and astronomy) and Katy Ott (mathematics).

Instead of a divide and conquer approach, the STEM Scholars program focuses on support and community building. The STEM Scholars “is not meant to be a competitive community,” says Hill. “It’s where you can learn and thrive together while building your science skills.”

While the primary goal of the program is to better serve the demographic of students who, data show, have frequently suffered negative STEM outcomes at �ֲ���ý and nationally — Black students, Latinx students, first-generation students — “we also have STEM Scholars who have other reasons to be part of a community that is interested in supporting each other,” says Hill. 

To that end, O’Hara was asked by Edgar Sarceno ‘23, a prospective math and physics major from Santa Fe, N.M., for advise on how to overcome coursework challenges. Lean on your community, O’Hara said, such as group study sessions.

She also suggested a visualization strategy: Think about past successes to bolster confidence in meeting a current challenge. “When I get to a really hard task, I think back to when I struggled and succeeded.”

Hill meets with many of the 28 “alumni” STEM Scholars who are now juniors and seniors, talking with them about STEM and, to help the program achieve sustainability, helping them train to be mentors to the program’s first- and second-year students.

“I’ve gotten the most joy in the last two weeks, talking to these students. It’s hard for all our students” — required masks, physical distancing, and limited social and other activities — “but they’re finding their own way to thrive. They’re studying like crazy — and feeling really proud of what they’ve accomplished in these courses.”

During the Zoom session, O’Hara did a fine job at meeting the sophomores where they are, on the verge of deeper STEM study. In a happy coincidence, her stories echoed themes of the college’s Purposeful Work program, particularly how one’s satisfaction and success in what we pursue must be aligned with what feels purposeful. 

“Pay attention to what you really enjoy,” O’Hara said, “what you find most fun and exciting, as well as actively seeking new and different experiences.” 

Banks says she often talks to students about what feels purposeful to them — about “being aware of what your own personality is telling you, what skill sets you’re developing, what things you’re drawn to — and how you might be able to best serve the world, the community, your school, whatever, just by being you.”

This fall, O’Hara was one of 10 scholars, researchers, and other professionals that Banks, Williams, and other professors brought into their STEM Scholar classrooms.

“The speakers contributed to many of our course goals,” explains Williams, such as bolstering students’ confidence and enthusiasm in science and math, and having a growth mindset. “Loral spoke explicitly to this,” said Williams.

O’Hara, who Zoomed in from Star City, the earthbound home of the Russian space program, traced her path from her childhood in Houston to becoming an astronaut based in Russia, where she continues her training until her chance to blast off on a mission to the International Space Station.

Long gone are the Apollo days when being an astronaut meant you were either a commander or a pilot.

O’Hara’s 13-member class of astronauts includes a Navy submarine warfare engineer; a microbiologist who studies organisms in subsurface environments, such as caves and deep-sea sediments; an emergency room physician; a commander of a Navy flight test squadron; a medical surgeon and combat helicopter pilot; and a SpaceX engineer with unusual prior experience: as an ice driller in Antarctica and commercial fisherman in Alaska.

“It’s a huge diversity of backgrounds,” O’Hara says. “This is one of my favorite things about the astronaut office: It shows that there’s no one path to success.” The diversity of the astronaut class also underscores another goal of the course, says Williams, “that the best science and math is done by diverse teams.”

Recalling her own path, O’Hara shared how, as a child, she loved to explore, hiking in the woods and mountains. Eventually it led her to latch onto the idea of being an astronaut (growing up in Houston also helped foment the idea). 

“I wrote a letter to NASA, and they wrote me back and told me to follow my dreams and study a STEM field,” O’Hara said. 

After earning a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas and a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue, she did deep-ocean engineering and operations work at Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, including experiences with the and the . 

O’Hara, who became friends with Williams while at Woods Hole, was selected to NASA’s astronaut training program in August 2017. 

Careers can have a tidy and linear appearance when we look back, O’Hara says. Sitting in Star City, where she is now eligible for a mission assignment, it might seem “easy to connect the dots and see how the pieces of your life come together.” 

But she assured Williams’ students that when you’re 18 and looking ahead, it’s not always clear how things will fall into place. “That was definitely the case for me,” she said. 

“If you had asked me in high school, if I would be working on deep-ocean research vessels by my 30s, I probably would’ve given you a sideways glance and asked, ‘What’s a research vessel?’” 

The message resonated with Mariam Josyula ‘23 of Longboat Key, Fla.

“It’s inspiring to talk with people who come from different backgrounds and taken different paths, but have still become so successful. You have to work hard and persevere, but your dreams are possible.”

Not long after arriving at �ֲ���ý to teach biology, Professor April Hill took a map, drew a circle with a 50-mile radius around Lewiston and the college, and gave Gavin Chen ’20, then a junior biology major, directions on how to start looking for sponges within that area. Rivers, lakes, anywhere with moving freshwater.

The evolutionary developmental geneticist was then nearly a decade into a research project with scientists around the world, studying Ephydatia muelleri, a freshwater sponge found throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

The group was working on the first chromosomal-level genome sequencing of the sponge, a goal they reached in July, with Hill serving as one of 17 authors of a . “It’s a big culminating work for our group,” she said. 

What makes this sponge special is its very common nature: It’s pancontinental. “It’s got this commonality to it where people can work on it all around the world,” Hill said. A Swedish E. muelleri is the same as a Chinese E. muelleri or an Androscoggin River E. muelleri. In learning more about this animal’s lineage and sharing that genome, Hill and her colleagues want to elevate it as a model animal for studying adaptations.

They’ve mapped how the sponge has changed over time to adapt to (and survive) its environment; that model can then be applied to research around human health and maintaining clean freshwater sources. Sponges are by no means exactly like us — for one thing, they often have symbiotic relationships with organisms like green algae, living inside their cells, conducting photosynthesis, and simultaneously feeding sugars to the sponge. But they can be related to us.

“They’re biomedically relevant,” said Hill, the college’s inaugural Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM. “And they’re also ecologically important. If you think about the environment or care about climate change, they are important organisms for us to pay attention to.” One of her main inquiries has focused on how genetic pathways are conserved — used and reused by different animals— over the course of evolution.

But in those early days at �ֲ���ý after leaving the University of Richmond, where she had chaired the biology department, Hill needed some fresh samples. She was confident that Chen, who had taken a research position for Short Term, could find them, since they are prevalent worldwide.

But he would have to put on his waders — as a recreational fly fisherman, not a problem — and plunge his hand into Maine’s spring waters to turn over rocks, looking on their bottoms for creatures that have been living, and evolving, on Earth for some 600 to 800 million years.

Her advice to the average sponge hunter? She’d tell them to keep an eye out for the prime consumer and spreader of sponges worldwide, waterfowl. “Go downstream of duck butts,” is the phrase she and her colleagues use.

Which Chen did. “It was difficult at first,” he said. “Freshwater sponges don’t look like a lot in the spring.”

“I made some mistakes along the way,” he said. Like the times he brought back dirt. “I would be like, ‘April, I think this a sponge’ and she would look at it and say, ‘You were close but this is dirt.’” 

It’s not an unreasonable confusion, dirt and sponges. Over winter, sponges go into a sort of hibernation. They’ll make, Hill said, “a decision and most of their cells will die except their stem cells. They have stem cells just like we have stem cells. And they’ll form these little bitty balls. We call them gemmules and they’ll secrete antifreeze proteins to cover all the stem cells.” Hill has “thousands of gemmules in the refrigerator” (in her lab at �ֲ���ý). When she wants to work with them, she thaws them out and they’ll grow into a sponge. 

“This is what I mean by adaptations,” Hill said. “It’s really cool. Like, if we got really cold, we’re gone, right?” But not the sponge. 

She’s also used the sponges in classes, including in the new introductory course, “Lab-Based Biological Inquiry,” that aims to plunge first years and sophomores right into research on various topics. Regardless of the topic, “What we teach students is, How do biologists ask questions? How do they plan experiments?” And then the students put that to practical use.

In her offering of the course last year, looking at symbiotic microalgae, “the students actually worked with both the sponges and the algae.” They cultured the algae to see if any of them made antibiotic compounds. They also did a simulated climate change experiment. (One of the features of freshwater sponges is that they have survived extreme conditions over time, Hill said.)

There’s a lot more potential research in that area, she said. While ocean organisms and their susceptibility to death and degradation due to climate change have been studied extensively, not much is known about freshwater ecosystems. “No one has really asked that question yet,” Hill said. “Like what happens if our fresh waters are polluted or heating up because of climate change?” It’s not just about the impact on how clean the water would be, but also on the fish life within.

That sponges even live in freshwater surprises many. “Most people think of sponges in the ocean,” Hill said. (She works on those too.) But what may seem obscure to some has proved good research material for �ֲ���ý students. “It is definitely something that students have enjoyed working on,” Hill said.  

Like Chen, who has fond memories of that Short Term he spent hunting sponges in Maine waterways and plugging what he’d find there into an Excel spreadsheet. (Lake Andrews? Not spongeworthy.)

Sometimes he encountered people who wanted to know what he was up to. “They would look at me a little funny,” he said. He discovered that water flow made a big difference in what he’d find. Too fast? Nothing. Ditto for too slow. He found a treasure trove of sponges near Sabattus. “When I started flipping over rocks, there were just sponges everywhere,” he said.

Back at the lab with Hill, he learned to isolate the DNA of the sponge and do species identification. Chen, who is working as a dental assistant while he waits to hear back from dental schools, said the project gave him new perspective. “It has changed my view,” he said. “I look at a river and think, there could be something in there.”  

Funded by a $3 million gift, a new �ֲ���ý College professorship dedicated to STEM equity and inclusion will be held by Professor of Biology April Hill, announced President Clayton Spencer.

Hill, the college’s inaugural Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM, is an evolutionary developmental geneticist with a distinguished record of scholarship.

She brings to �ֲ���ý a national reputation for leading significant programs to dismantle barriers that prevent underrepresented groups from thriving in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Professor of Biology April Hill is the inaugural Wagener Family Professor of Equity and Inclusion in STEM. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“We are thrilled with the appointment of April Hill,” Spencer said. “April is a distinguished scientist, outstanding teacher, and successful academic leader who believes that creating diverse, inclusive, and equitable STEM communities is a prerequisite to redefining excellence in the sciences.”

A member of the faculty at the University of Richmond since 2004, Hill joined �ֲ���ý in 2018.

“Helping to build communities of students who thrive in STEM is my vocational cornerstone, so it is a great honor to be the inaugural holder of the Wagener Professorship,” said Hill. “In words and actions, �ֲ���ý cares deeply about finding answers to STEM inequities. I hope to learn from the �ֲ���ý community how I can contribute to fostering inclusive excellence in the context of a �ֲ���ý education.”

The Wagener Professorship has been endowed by a $3 million gift to The �ֲ���ý Campaign from Deborah Heitz P’17 and Shaw Wagener P’17. “The idea for our gift came through our family’s experience at �ֲ���ý,” said Shaw Wagener. “We are so pleased to see the convergence between our goals for this professorship and the college’s plans to create a more inspiring and effective experience for all students who wish to pursue studies in STEM fields.”

“She will be a worthy inaugural recipient of the Wagener Professorship — an exemplar of the important charge of this new endowed chair.”

Hill’s appointment follows a national search begun in fall 2017 by a seven-member �ֲ���ý faculty search committee chaired by Professor of Politics and Associate Dean of the Faculty Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir.

“The committee members are looking forward to April Hill’s leadership as we take on the questions of equity and inclusion in STEM fields,” said Ásgeirsdóttir. “All evidence of her ability to foster institutional change, in addition to being an excellent scientist and a teacher, tells us that she will be a worthy inaugural recipient of the Wagener Professorship — an exemplar of the important charge of this new endowed chair.”

The founding of the Wagener Professorship comes in the same year as �ֲ���ý’ selection, in July, for a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as part of the national HHMI Inclusive Excellence initiative, which aims to catalyze national efforts to broaden participation of students from all backgrounds in the study of science.

As a researcher, teacher, and academic leader, Hill has led numerous efforts that yielded improvements in STEM education.

A first-generation-to-college student, Hill earned a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry from the University of North Texas and a doctorate in human genetics from the University of Houston. A postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, she served on the faculties of Fairfield and Yale universities before joining the University of Richmond.

During her 14 years on the University of Richmond faculty, Hill was honored as the Clarence E. Denoon Jr. Professor of Science (2009–15) in recognition of her excellence in research and teaching. Promoted to full professor in 2013, she chaired the Department of Biology from 2016 to 2018.

As a researcher, teacher, and academic leader, Hill has led numerous efforts that yielded improvements in STEM education, making major contributions to the work of three consecutive HHMI grants of more than $3.7 million at UR, the last of which made significant advances in supporting underrepresented populations in STEM.

In 2012–13, Hill served as a Vision & Change Founding Leadership Fellow for the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education. Known as PULSE, the program seeks to stimulate systemic changes within biology departments at all types of post-secondary educational institutions. She is a past recipient of the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

Her research and leadership to improve STEM education has received significant grant support from the National Science Foundation and the Thomas F. and Kate Miller Jeffress Memorial Trust, as well as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and other sources.

A major goal of her UR research laboratory was to create an inclusive community of support that would persist beyond her students’ college years.

She was a member of the university’s Terms of Racial Justice Faculty Knowledge Community, an effort to advance public understanding of racial justice. She served on the university’s Pathways Advising Program, which places first-generation students with faculty who have received training and support to serve as effective mentors.

As a researcher, Hill uses marine and freshwater sponges as model systems to look at the evolution of genetic regulatory pathways that govern the development of animal form and function. Conducted with undergraduates, Hill’s research has been presented and published widely at research conferences and gatherings worldwide and in leading peer-reviewed journals.

A major goal of her UR research laboratory was to create an inclusive community of support that would persist beyond her students’ college years. Forty-six percent of her research students were from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. Thirty-six of her students have been co-authors on 20 of her publications.

“I consider this form of pedagogical engagement to be my best teaching,” she said.