Science at Lewis & Clark College

Early in 2008 the College of Arts and Sciences received a grant from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to establish a Beckman Scholars Program in Chemistry and Biological Sciences. The Beckman Scholars Program “provides scholarships that contribute significantly in advancing the education, research training, and personal development of select students in chemistry, biochemistry, and the biological and medical sciences. The sustained, in-depth undergraduate research experiences and comprehensive faculty mentoring are unique in terms of program scope, content, and level of scholarship awards.”

Later in the year the College received a grant of $1.3 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Science Education Program. The HHMI grant funds the CAUSE (Collaborative Approaches to Undergraduate Science Education) program at Lewis & Clark, with focus on the following main areas:

• Development of curricula and research initiatives in interdisciplinary science, with special attention to bioinformatics, biophysics, and neuroscience (in collaboration with faculty at Oregon Health & Science University);
• Development of science courses for students not majoring in the mathematical and natural sciences;
• A K-12 outreach program for science education, in collaboration with the Graduate School of Education and Counseling;
• An international outreach program for science education, with special attention to collaboration with institutions in East Africa; and
• A teaching post-doctoral fellows program in the sciences.

It is important to underscore that Lewis & Clark was the only liberal arts College in Oregon, and one of only six in the West, to receive this major recognition, reserved by HHMI to those institutions with excellent academic programs and the potential to implement innovative strategies that can become national models for the improvement of science education and research.

Indeed, our numbers on science education do tell a story of excellence and success. Over $8 million in grants have been awarded to science faculty members since 2001. And in the last seven years we have seen an increase by 514 percent in research grant dollars awarded to faculty members in mathematics and natural sciences. Current funding sources include the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Research Corporation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, American Chemical Society, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, The Geological Society of America, Merck Institute for Science Education, and the Mathematical Association of America. Very recently, Naiomi Cameron, assistant professor of mathematics, received a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Eight of our last 12 National Science Foundation grant proposals have been funded, and all four National Institutes of Health proposals submitted in the last three years have been funded.
These agencies fund on average fewer than 20 percent of proposals. In 2008 three faculty members received major awards from the National Science Foundation. Brian Detweiler-Bedell and Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, both associate professors of psychology, received a $149,648 grant from the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program for their work, “Using Laddered Teams to Promote a Research-Supportive Curriculum.” Anne Bentley, assistant professor of chemistry, received a $100,000 Discovery Corps Faculty Development Award to support her research and teaching. And Nikolaus Loening, assistant professor of chemistry, received a $191,764 Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) program grant from the National Institutes of Health to support his research program aimed at discovering interesting peptides and proteins from the venom of the brown recluse spider and its relatives.
Our science students represent an essential part of our success story. Our student-scholars are well positioned to become leaders in science, and forty percent of recent graduates in biochemistry/molecular biology, biology, and chemistry are enrolled in graduate or M.D. programs.

Twenty-two Lewis & Clark students have received Goldwater Scholarships since the program’s inception in 1993. Allison Akagi, a senior majoring in chemistry and Claire Fassio and Conor Jacobs, both seniors majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology; each received Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships. The scholarships support “study in the fields of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences as preparation for careers in these areas.”

Eleven Lewis & Clark students have received National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships since 1984. Currie ’07 received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Biochemistry. Melissa Callahan ’05, Sarah Collins ’07, Christopher ’05, and Shannon McGonagle ’04 all received honorable mention.