Faculty Involvement

The REU Program focuses on faculty development as well as student development through several initiatives: current faculty enrichment through a seminar series and symposia. These initiatives aim to expand cross-disciplinary research activities, coordinate undergraduate instruction between science departments, and increase the involvement of graduate students and post-docs in undergraduate education.

The CMBB Faculty Seminar Group is a group of cross-disciplinary faculty and graduate students that meets regularly to discuss and learn about relevant scientific research, novel techniques, current issues and problem solving.

Some of the meetings are faculty development seminars with outside speakers who have been involved in developing new computational tools or investigating molecular mechanisms. Other meetings are planning sessions for the integrating curricula in the sciences and developing collaborative research efforts at the interfaces of the disciplines.

Participants come from the departments of biology, computer science, chemistry, physics, statistics, molecular biology and biochemistry, and represent the GW schools of medicine, engineering, and liberal arts. If you are a GW graduate student, post-doc, or faculty member interested in becoming a part of the CMBB group, email reu@gwu.edu.

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Dr. Mark Reeves (Co-PI) developed a Physical Biology unit for the introductory training workshop. One goal of this day-long unit is to have students apply Newtonian principles to the propulsion of protists and bacteria. A second objective is to lead the students to understand how probablility and random-walk serve to explain molecular (Brownian) motion. Students use small video camaras attached to microscopes to capture the motions and then analyze the video data using Logger-Pro software.

During the summer Dr. Susan Gillmor (Chemistry, Mentor to REU students) organized Microscopy Workshop, a series of lectures, five of her own and two guest lecturers (Mark Reeves and Anastas Popratiloff). The workshop explored general light optics, broadfield microscopy, phase contrast, differential interference, fluoresce, confocal and spectroscopic techniques. Image analysis and processing were included in the lectures. Anastas Popratiloff gave the final lecture of cell imaging and briefly described electron microscopy topics such as SEM and TEM. Gillmor uses microscopy on a daily basis in her lab and advertised open participation from all parts of the university, including chemistry, biology, physics and the medical school. She incorporated computer JAVA tutorials from the major microscope manufacturers (Olympus and Nikon)