Biology
Faculty Focus: Dr. Stacie Brown & Inquiry-Based Learning
Director of First Year Lab to partner with national project to examine anti-biotic resistance
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Dr. Stacie Brown, Director of First Year Laboratories at Southwestern University
Dr. Stacie Brown, director of first year biology laboratories, has been selected to participate in the Prevalence of Antibiotic-Resistant microbes in the Environment (PARE) project, a program through Yale University that provides undergraduates the opportunity to participate in an authentic research experience and contribute data to a national database! The objectives of this nationally recognized program align perfectly with the Biology Department’s efforts to transform the laboratory exercises into research, which has been partially supported by the SU Inquiry Initiative funded by the HHMI grant.
Dr. Brown worked last summer to create a new inquiry-based learning experience for the Living Systems course (formerly Biodiversity) in collaboration with Dr. Romi Burks and Dr. Erika Borden. She will now make some slight modifications to the course and add an outreach component involving high school students. This also fits with Southwestern’s emphasis on Community Based Engagement. Together, faculty involved in the first year sequence also incorporated Twitter into the classes that Brown and Borden taught last fall. Students in the lab described papers they read by sending tweets to @SUbiodiversity.
Just now in her second year at Southwestern, Dr. Brown brings a wealth of experience in research in microbiology. In May, Dr. Brown, served as a co-author for a paper published in Microbiology titled “Indole inhibition of N-acylated homoserine lactone-mediated quorum signaling is widespread in Gram-negative bacteria.”