A. Malcolm Campbell - Davidson college - Life at a primarily undergraduate institution - Pui

I'd like to talk to you about my career where I am primarily a teacher, but also a biologist. So many people think that there is a correct way to become a faculty member at a primarily undergraduate institution or PUI. And the best thing that you can do is to take a straight line from beginning to end. Right? You want to try to get this perfect fit to the points. But my career did not take a straight path. I had a Watson Fellowship to study in Australia for a year, and then my wife and I taught in Kenya for a year. So I took two years off within my graduate school training. Then I took a non-traditional postdoc as a teaching postdoc before I finally wound up with the job I got now. So pathways do not have to be straight, in fact some of these detours probably helped my teaching. So I had 3 years between undergraduate and graduate school and I really would not trade those for anything. So once I got to graduate school I am going to describe to you a couple things to help you understand what I went through. And I knew I wanted to teach at a PUI, and so I chose a good project, but not a risky project. And I learned a lot of methods, but when I got to my thesis lab, my advisor when he realized that I wanted to teach, he said you are going to go brain-dead, don't go into teaching. Well, we had a disagreement, but by the end of my PhD, I was prepared to teach Cell, Molecular, Immunology or Introductory Biology. And I did go on to get a postdoc. I debated whether that was appropriate, but it was good because it helped me start from fresh and get up and productive quickly, but as indicated, I did not have a standard postdoc. I spent one year at Washington University with Ursula Goodenough, and she is a very good teacher, and I learned to work with Chlamydomonas, this unicellular green algae, which allowed me to teach Genetics. And during this time I supervised my first undergraduate student. Then for the second year of my postdoc, I went to Macalester College and there I worked with Jan Serie, who was by far the best teacher I have ever met. And so she really mentored me in teaching, and that is my first piece of advice. If you are thinking about a teaching career, get with a master teacher and study under that person. You will learn a lot. Go to as many classes as you can and understand the dynamics of a good teacher and her class. Then I also at this time developed a teaching lab where students could take a single hair, isolate the DNA, and get a genetic fingerprint. And I published that, and I got a lot of positive feedback from that. And that's when I realized that I can actually do research in two areas, the basic research I was trained in and now pedagogy or the way to teach. So these experiences really helped me move into the current job that I've had for 18 years at Davidson College. So let me describe to you how the job is described, and how you typically spend time. And it is by and far all about teaching, then research, and a little bit of advising and service to give you the 100%. But in reality, if you are really motivated and you love your job, like I do, then you are going to spend more time working with the students and advising them and also doing service. So that in fact this is not a job where you go to relax and sort of kick back and have early retirement. You can do a lot of exciting work with undergraduates at schools like this. So I often get asked by graduate students and postdocs, what does it take to get tenure at a place? They are familiar with the research jobs, but not the teaching jobs. And it's the same 3-legged stool where teaching, scholarship, and service, are taken into consideration, but at a teaching institution, that is the major category. Then scholarship, then service. So let me describe to you how I spend my time in these three areas. So the first thing that I wanted to tell you is when I start teaching molecular biology, I started with the textbook, but very quickly, I published a series of papers, not published, but modified for the web, a series of papers, and I stopped using textbooks. And students got to learn how to read papers and analyze data, and think about it as a science, not a vocabulary lesson. The next course where I did some innovation was in Immunology. And if you go to a small school, you are going to have to teach something outside your comfort zone oftentimes. And immunology was a stretch for me, but as part of my ability to teach it, I learned how to do animations with Flash, so again I was able to develop some new teaching tools that I shared with teachers around the country through the web. Then for my sabbatical in the year 2000, I went to the Institute for Systems Biology where Lee Hood helped me learn a lot of genomics. And with my colleague, Laurie Heyer, who is a mathematician, we wrote the first true genomics textbook, and then that has gone into a second edition, where we help bring genomics into the undergraduate curriculum. After that we started doing research in synthetic biology so we developed a seminar course and then brought teaching and research together with synthetic biology where we have had teams of students, undergraduates, go to the international genetically engineered machines competition called iGEM that is hosted at MIT. And we have competed in that competition for many years. The last area that I want to share with you is Introductory Biology. And this course has been taught the same way for many, many years, and it is sort of not taught in the best way because memorization is over emphasized. And students don't really understand how we know what we know. So with my colleagues, Laurie Heyer again, and Chris Paradise, an ecologist, we decided to redesign Intro Bio, and we focused on 5 big ideas: information, evolution, cells as a functional unit, emergent properties, and homeostasis. And each of these five big ideas are taught at five levels of organization: molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecological system. I've been doing this for a couple of years. The learning outcome with the students is very impressive, and I look forward to continuing this with my colleagues. So I've told you a little bit about the teaching part, now I want to talk some about the scholarship. Now scholarship has two definitions for me. There is the basic research and the pedagogical research or educational research. In the 18 years that I have been at Davidson, I've been able to publish about 50 papers with undergraduates and faculty members co-authoring this in a range of different kinds of journals, all the way from the famous basic research to more pedagogical journals. The area of research has changed for me over time. For the basic research I started with Cell and Molecular Biology, then moved into genomics using DNA microarrays, and this is an example of a DNA microarray that some undergraduates printed at Davidson, where they figured out how to control the robot so well that they could even print in DNA the Davidson logo. And more recently we have moved into synthetic biology where students blend math, computer science, and molecular biology to design and build bacterial computers that solve math problems. So the scholarship has always focused on undergraduates. We don't have any graduate students and they do the work. We mentor them. I've been working with Todd Eckdahl and Jeff Poet at Missouri Western State University in synthetic biology. My students have gone on to graduate programs, won fellowships to study around the world. They've gone into a range of different professions, including medicine. And that's a really good outcome to have a scientifically trained physician. And our research has been funded by other agencies. Now let's describe service, and service not only on the campus which I won't really talk about, but more service in the larger community. And one of the first things I did was I joined the ASCB, American Society for Cell Biology's Education Committee. And that was a great move, and I really recommend that to those of you who are graduate students or postdocs to get involved in your professional society's educational programs. To get the network of other faculty who do this for a living. The next major initiative was becoming editor of CBE Life Sciences Education. And in this position, I really came up with an understanding of assessment, and that is my second suggestion to those of you who are thinking about educational careers is to learn about the scholarship of teaching. Learn about how to assess learning goals, and in this process, I learned how to design courses properly. And that is you start with the educational goals, and then you think about how do I assess whether I accomplished my goals. And then focus on the content, not the other way around, which is how I started off teaching. I've also given a number of workshops in pedagogy and then I started GCAT. The Genome Consortium for Active Teaching. Now GCAT started in 2000 when I was in Seattle at the Institute for Systems Biology. And we focused on DNA microarrays as a way to measure the transcription of genes in whole organisms. And through funding from NSF and Howard Hughes Medical Institute we've been able to train over 360 faculty members and have more than 24,000 students do original research experiments with DNA microarrays. But DNA microarrays are fading out, so we split GCAT into three areas and we focus now more on synthetic biology and sequencing, the next-gen sequencing, which is being run out of Juniata College in Pennsylvania. And Todd, and Laurie, and Jeff, and I are leading in the synthetic biology efforts for GCAT, and this is again where we blend math and biology to produce students who are cross trained. And that's a great preparation for future careers. So in summation, my scholarship, my teaching has allowed me to blend biology, math, computer science, work with some great colleagues at Missouri Western State University, but my research is not grant dependent. We use grants, but if funding dries up, like right now, it is a very difficult time to get grants, my students can still graduate in time. They can still do research and if we need to we can change directions easily, and my research component of my job, the scholarship, is a low stress environment because nothing is dependent on getting the grants, and we publish as we can. So when you are thinking about a career, and you are thinking about what should I do, I want to just go through one point with you, and remember that my early publications were in Journal of Biological Chemistry, and in 2010 they published 42,000 pages. And there are journals, 2500 journals, that publish in the life sciences. So if you do that multiplication, you realize that there is lots and lots of basic research going on, but which ones have impact? And so you want to blend your talents with where you can have the greatest impact. Since you'll spend a lot of time at work, have as big of an impact as you can. So at Missouri Western and at Davidson, we have three goals, or three rules really in the lab. Everybody has to learn. Everybody has to have fun, and we try to contribute to the body of science. So we have diverse students from lots of different backgrounds. We have fun, we learn, and we publish. It is a great way to influence students who can go on to lots of different fields. So when I was trying to weigh these things out, I could have gone with a job at research 1 institution where research, salary, fame, prestige, scientific prestige, would be much higher than at a small school. But for me there were so many other factors that made it very easy to decide. So I work with students, I love my job, a lot less pressure, I have great equipment, and I just have fun. So try to choose a job where you have fun, where you get to do what you always wanted to do. So in ending here, I would like to thank many people, especially Jan Serie, Laurie Heyer, Todd and Jeff, and all of the faculty members at GCAT. And then Sally O'Connor at NSF who really recognized the capacity to have a large impact by funding pedagogical workshops where you train the teachers so they can train all of the students. So as you sort out what is the right choice for you, try to have the greatest impact you can, and have fun the way I do as a teacher.