AROUND THE QUADS
In Lumine Tuo

Around the Quads

• Rushdie's Midnight's Children coming to the Apollo • General Science Course Being Created for Core • Bizup Developing New Writing Program • Bollinger Adds Two Key Administrators • Campus Bulletins • Alumni News • Transitions • In Lumine Tuo • In Memoriam • Elbaum, Carroll Receive CCYA Achievement Awards • Athletics' Bill Steinman Retires (Sort of)

HHMI PROFESSOR: When Darcy Kelley was a high school student, her teachers told her she had too exuberant a personality to go into science. “That was a misperception on their part of the character of scientists,” says Kelly, a professor of biological sciences and co-director of the Doctoral Subcommittee in Neurobiology and Behavior. She believes her mission as a teacher is to show students that science is cool, and as one of 20 newly named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professors, Kelley is receiving a $1 million grant across four years to do just that.

“I feel very strongly that students in general don’t get to experience the excitement of science when they come to college,” says Kelley, Columbia’s first HHMI Professor. “Our aim is to introduce all the kids to cutting edge science and give them all the analytical skills — what an experiment is, how you build a model. We want to enlarge the constituency of scientists. Rather than have students shrink from science, we want to show them how cool it is.”

As part of the grant project, Kelley is working with astronomy professors David Helfand and Jacqueline van Gorkom and others to create a new science course that is being piloted for inclusion in the Core Curriculum (please see page 7). The course will include lectures and discussion sections on topics such as the dark matter, the origins of life and how the brain works.

“Columbia is really strong on the humanities, and I’m all for that,” Kelley says. “The question is: How can you combine that with a really exciting experience in science? People don’t appreciate how creative science is; [they] think it’s just grinding numbers. It’s just as creative as composing a piece of music. Your papers are stories you use to explain the experiments you do. If you’re really good, you can write a really good story.”

Kelley also is involved in the design of a course geared towards biology majors, most of whom will head to careers in clinical medicine, that will teach how clinical trials are designed and analyzed. “As future doctors — and future patients — our majors are going to be making important decisions based on the results of clinical trials,” she says. Learning how to critically evaluate this new evidence-based medicine is something that we can begin with our advanced undergraduates.”

Editor of the Journal of Neurobiology, Kelley studies the biological origins of sexual differences, and in particular the actions of the gonadal steroid hormones androgen and estrogen. Her studies focus on the vocal behaviors of the South African clawed frog, which uses its repertoire of songs to signal receptivity and unreceptivity, dominance and territoriality. Inspired by renowned biologist and former Columbia professor Thomas Hunt Morgan, a major focus of Kelley’s lab has been setting up a project to study the genetic underpinnings of perception and production of song in the frog. As an HHMI professor, Kelley will work with teams of undergraduates to develop a new genetic model system for the neurobiology of the behavior of the frog Xenopus tropicalis.