Research Philosophy

Teaching Science by Doing Science

Walk down the halls of the A. Paul Schaap Science Center on an afternoon.  You'll  see the usual array of  undergraduate biology students -- a comparative anatomy class here, students etherizing flies over there in that genetics lab, some first year students learning how to use a spread sheet to make a graph, a professor speaking to his parasitology class about his experiences in the Sudan.  You'll see all that, but you'll see more if you look carefully -- that journal club studying original literature about fat synthesis in yeast, two students with state-of-the-art equipment figuring out the sequence of a length of DNA, another little group in this lab studying a video tape they've made of blue bird behavior.   These are undergraduates in Biology at Hope College doing original research in collaboration with faculty  Let's take a closer look.

Faculty in Biology at Hope College consider their job to be research with undergraduates. At Hope that doesn't just mean working in a lab with a small number of advanced students.  It does mean that, of course, but it also means designing the whole curriculum to support research with students -- from Intro Biology right on up. 

It takes the real thing -- grant writing, sophisticated equipment, student attendance at professional meetings, peer-reviewed publication -- to teach the real  thing.

Here, Krista is preparing a gel to study some of the the properties of the hormone receptor VACM-1.

Faculty Research Interests