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.”

Seeking to improve the efficiency of its beer making, a Lewiston craft brewery partnered with a �ֲ���ý student who is not yet old enough to legally sip suds in Maine.

Emily Tamkin ’23, a 19-year-old biology major from Lafayette, Calif., used her Purposeful Work internship at . to help the brewery measure the bitterness of its ales and lagers. Not with a sip and swallow, but more accurately, with a high-tech �ֲ���ý laboratory instrument.

Bitterness is key to making any beer taste the way it does, and it’s usually created by adding more or less hops. An India pale ale is made with more hops, hence its bitterness. Pale ales and lagers are made with less hopes — they’re smoother.

Smaller craft breweries like Baxter typically use commercial software to measure a beer’s bitterness, which is expressed in International Bitterness Units, or IBUs. Every beer has an IBU “target.” Baxter’s flagship Stowaway IPA is a 69, while the brewery’s Staycation Land Brilliant Lager is 17.5.

For some time, Baxter Director of Quality Merritt Waldron has suspected that his IBU software has been telling him to add “too many hops to get to our target values” for each Baxter beer. This is where �ֲ���ý and Tamkin entered the scene. Working with Waldron, Tamkin analyzed Baxter beer samples in the �ֲ���ý lab of Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks.

A physics graduate of the University of Southern Maine, Waldron is the . As Baxter’s quality czar, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to his work. But to investigate his theory, he needed research support, including access to a spectrophotometer to calculate IBU levels experimentally and the controlled environment of a laboratory. So he reached out to �ֲ���ý, “our neighbors.”

Science, whether chemistry, biology, or physics, is as integral to beer-making as barley, hops, and yeast, so the fact that Tamkin isn’t old enough to drink Baxter beer (she turns 21, Maine’s legal drinking age, next August) is irrelevant, says Waldron. “Emily and I just talk about the science.”

In Tamkin’s project, the science is found in the chemistry of hops. Hops contain alpha acids, which when heated become bitter-tasting iso-alpha acids. “When these acids hit your taste buds, your brain receptors understand it as bitter,” Tamkin explains.

Over the summer, Tamkin would drive downtown to pick up samples from the brewery, located in stunningly renovated �ֲ���ý Mill space. The samples are taken at four spots in the brewing process, including before hops are added and the final canned product.

She then drove the samples back to the Banks lab in Carnegie Science Hall, soon to be moved to the new Bonney Science Center. (Lest she get pulled over for possession of alcohol, Tamkin had a letter from Waldron indicating that she was transporting beer for research purposes.) 

On a recent Wednesday, she picked up samples of Stowaway; Hopeful, a session IPA; and Gopher It, a hazy triple IPA. In the lab, she used a spectrophotometer to calculate the true IBU values of various Baxter beers by measuring their iso-alpha acids. All told, Tamkin analyzed 12 of the brewery’s nearly 20 beers over the summer. 

Tamkin is now back home in California and will present her findings after the �ֲ���ý school year starts.

For Baxter, the partnership with �ֲ���ý is about brewing excellent beer while spending less on ingredients like hops. We asked Waldron a question: What if Tamkin does find that Baxter can lower the amount of hops to achieve an accurate IBU target? Won’t lowering the amount of hops change the taste of the brewery’s beers?

Not necessarily, he says. “Most human palates can only taste a small range of IBU values. Most can’t taste the difference between 10 IBUs. So if Emily’s results say that I can shave off 10 IBUs to achieve a more accurate number, we can lower the amount of hops, save money, and the consumer won’t notice the difference.”

Hops are pricey, up to $20 per pound, so the savings could be significant. Waldron runs the numbers for Stowaway IPA, which uses a popular hop known as Cascade, which runs about $10 per pound.  

“Five pounds of Cascade is equal to about 10 IBUs in one ‘turn’ of Stowaway IPA,” — about 30 barrels — “and we typically brew 280 turns of Stowaway a year,” Waldron explains. “If I can save five pounds of Cascade per turn, that’s 1,400 pounds of hops per year. At around $10 per pound, that’s an annual savings of $14,000.”

Tracking IBUs is just one part of the Baxter quality program. , anchored by a beer-testing panel of Baxter employees, that rigorously identifies the essential nature of each Baxter beer, through taste, smell, look, feel, .

“We call the essence of each brand its ‘true-to-target’ profile,” says Waldron. “Testing brews against their profile is the goal of the sensory program.” Any reduction in hops suggested by Tamkin’s research would need to make its way through the beer-testing panel, he says.

For Tamkin, the summer project sweetened an interest in food science. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a career, and grappling with whether that meant pre-med or academia,” she explains. 

Turns out, a third path appeared in Tamkin’s search for purposeful work. “Working with Baxter, being able to do all this amazing science with them, has opened up a world for me — how science relates to other industries that I never really thought of before.” And that’s the point of Purposeful Work internships, explains Banks, for how they “empower students to take on real-world problems while pursuing their studies.”

Besides helping Baxter, Tamkin hopes her experimental results will yield solid enough findings for a scholarly paper. 

“The experience of being able to design a research project and do it well enough to write a paper about it has been really, really exciting,” she says. “I wouldn’t have had the opportunity without Baxter being so great and without the Banks Lab.”

Waldron studied physics at the University of Southern Maine. At the time, “I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my major,” he says. “Then I ended up getting into brewing. Seeing all the science behind it, I just got super excited about it.

“So, as a scientist myself, being able to inspire a real-world application of the theoretical stuff you learn in college in someone like Emily — that’s part of the reason why I was really excited to have a Purposeful Work intern, not to mention being able to partner with �ֲ���ý, our neighbors.”

So raise your can of Baxter Stowaway, your Gopher It, or your Staycation Land, and say cheers to good science, good beer, and good neighbors.

“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.”

So much has changed.

”In about seven days, we converted it to an online environment with faculty who had largely never taught in that environment and students who had largely never learned in that environment,” says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavellero.

But some things haven’t changed, say these �ֲ���ý professors, who, from their new off-campus workspaces, share insights and takeaways after two weeks of teaching their students remotely.

Video by Theophil Syslo.

The strong bond between students and their professors hasn’t weakened. “I still care about my students — as individuals, people on an intellectual and personal journey,” says Su Langdon, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “I still want them to succeed.”

And the students are still diving into schoolwork.  “I am still teaching a community of students that are enthusiastic about learning the Japanese language,” says Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks is impressed. ”I’ve got to give it to them,” she says of her students. “They’re pulling through … They are absolutely stepping up to the plate.”

The faculty who appear in this �ֲ���ý News video, in order, are:

• Rebecca Fraser-Thill, Visiting Instructor in Psychology
• Joshua Rubin, Lecturer in Anthropology
• Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese
• Michael Rocque, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Jonathan Cavallero, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies
• Lori Banks, Assistant Professor of Biology
• Su Langdon, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, Assistant Professor of Physics
• Stephanie Pridgeon, Assistant Professor of Spanish

The world is watching the novel coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 600 people and infected more than 30,000 in China, and that has now spread to more than 25 other countries, including the U.S.

And of course �ֲ���ý is watching it too — and finding in this respiratory affliction some important lessons, particularly in how the disease gets around and the role played by individual choices.

During a microbiology class in January, the virus prompted Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks and her students to talk about how, in a sense, not all contagion is strictly microbial.

“We talked about how good information vs. unsubstantiated information about outbreaks can change people’s behavior,” she says, “and how you have to be extremely careful in the things that you’re forwarding on social media.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks advises caution when sharing information about the novel coronavirus. Don’t just forward something along “because it looked sensational.” (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“You need to make sure that you’re pulling from a good reputable source and not just forwarding something because it looked sensational.”

The center of the outbreak in China, the city of Wuhan, offers a cautionary tale about the disease of bad information.

“Prior to the major public health machine getting going” and locking down travel in and out of the city, Banks says, “these sensational messages that were getting out caused something like 5 million people to evacuate,” many of them especially anxious to travel during the Chinese Lunar New Year. This during the eruption of a virus whose incubation period can take up to two weeks.

“So imagine if you were at the back end of that, and now you’ve traveled halfway around the world,” says Banks. “You could have been shedding virus, but asymptomatic, for almost two weeks before you would know that you were sick. So not the best idea.”

This Centers for Disease Control and Prevention illustration shows the spikes that adorn the outer surface of the 2019 novel coronavirus, which impart the look of a corona when viewed electron microscopically, hence the name “coronavirus.” (Alissa Eckert, MS, Dan Higgins, MAM)

The coronavirus outbreak has proven especially relevant to a senior seminar on biomathematics taught by Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer, whose published research helped to shed light on the spread of the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” virus at �ֲ���ý and elsewhere in 2009.

Greer’s students research and present topics related to biological applications of math, including modeling the spread of disease.

“This is a type of math that closely relates to other aspects of our lives and international life,” Greer told her students during a class session in late January. Mathematicians and public health officials deploy a variety of models to predict the spread and impact of disease.

For instance, a model that Greer has taught in the seminar uses differential equations, which are used to quantify change, to estimate how many people might catch a disease, as well as to predict its geographical spread.

The factors that drive a disease model include the length of the incubation period, the duration of typical infections, the population of the area where the disease first breaks out, and travel patterns.

Meredith Greer and students in a Hathorn Hall classroom during a January meeting of Greer’s course “Advanced Topics in Biomathematics.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Air travel makes it possible for people to go pretty far pretty quickly, so the disease can go anywhere pretty fast,” Greer told the class.

Xuchong Shao ’20 of Shanghai put a fine point on the importance of the calendar in the spread of disease. The Lunar New Year, which took place at the end of January, is “pretty much like Thanksgiving break in the U.S.,” he said. “Everyone’s traveling to their home.”

“These questions of encouraging or discouraging travel have a big effect on disease spread, but it’s also really relevant to people’s customs,” Greer said. “There are not easy answers.”

If modeling can predict the spread of a disease, it can also tip off officials that their reporting might be off. In the case of novel coronavirus, that could happen because its symptoms can resemble a cold (also often brought to you by a coronavirus, albeit a different species) or influenza. And such cases might not be reported.

“If distances to which it’s spread or the rate of spread are inconsistent with the total number of people who are reported as being sick, that would be a clue that maybe not enough people have been reported as being sick,” Greer said.

Meredith Greer responds to a student’s remark during a session of “Advanced Topics in Biomathematics.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At any rate, Greer told her class, it may be too early for a reliable model of novel coronavirus. Mathematicians, epidemiologists, and public health officials might have to compare and interrogate several models before a clear picture emerges.

As Lori Banks reminds us, influenza “is really a bigger public health concern.”

As always, it’s the unknown that’s the most unsettling aspect of a disease like novel coronavirus, and previously its coronavirus cousins, SARS and MERS. “They don’t know why it’s spreading,” Greer said. “They don’t know how many people will get it, or how many people will die, or how far around the globe it will spread.”

But all things in proportion.

As Lori Banks reminds us, influenza “is really a bigger public health concern. The good news is the precautions that people should take to prevent both of those viruses, both flu and novel coronavirus, are about the same” — wash your hands, cover your cough, don’t share food, don’t go blessing your friends and classmates with your presence when you’re feeling seedy.

But there’s one important difference, Banks notes. “If someone is exhibiting symptoms of a respiratory infection, and they’re sick enough to see a medical professional, they should probably call ahead” to allow that medical practice to prepare, just in case the culprit is novel coronavirus.