Nelson to champion innovative ways to teach biology

Few roles in life can be as conflicted as that of professor at a big research university.

Dave Nelson knows this as well as anyone. For 32 years, Nelson, a professor of biochemistry, has struggled to balance the roles of researcher and teacher in one of the country’s preeminent life science departments.

From the get-go, he explains, the pressure is on to establish oneself as a serious researcher by winning grants, setting up a focused program of research, publishing, and courting the best graduate and post-doctoral students to make it all work. That the role of teacher is often pushed aside by the stress and demands of the research culture has been a difficult and unavoidable fact of life for many.

“Faculty, almost without exception, are overcommitted,” Nelson says. “I think most faculty want to do a good job of teaching, but our work doesn’t leave much time or energy to be innovative in the classroom.”

Now, Nelson, who himself has won several prestigious teaching awards, will have the opportunity — and the time — to help biologists of all stripes become better, more inventive teachers. In November Nelson was selected by a committee of faculty and staff to become the Center for Biology Education’s third director. The center was founded in July 1988 by a small group of faculty, including plant pathologist Paul Williams, botany Professor Wayne Becker, oncologist and then-Biotechnology Center Director Richard Burgess, geneticist Raymond Kessel and School of Education professor James Stewart. Williams served as CBE’s first director from 1989 to 1995. Nelson succeeds Millard Susman, an emeritus professor of genetics who directed the center from 1995 to 2002.

“Working in an organization that is this big and broad, it’s not a trivial thing to think about the future. But the time is right. The world is changing and we have all of these exciting new opportunities,” Nelson says, citing a recent flurry of grant activity that will pump tens of millions of dollars into UW–Madison science education initiatives during the next five years.

“CBE has as its charge to generate innovative ideas for the classroom and beyond, and over the next 20 years there will be big changes in the way biology is taught,” he adds.

To influence such change, Nelson argues, CBE must continue to act in novel ways to leverage campus expertise for developing new ways of teaching biology at all levels. He says the center must continue to serve as a key campus node for everything from advising undergraduates to bringing new experiences to the classroom.

The long and close collaboration between CBE and the School of Education, Nelson says, will continue and expand, bringing new insights into how students learn into the science classroom and lab.

“CBE has and will function best catalytically, and by doing things that are innovative. There is a need for a centralized mechanism, a center that can cut across disciplines and schools and colleges, provide good advising, and even help students learn skills like how to write a proposal or apply to graduate school.”

Moreover, with more than 60 life science departments on campus, there is a significant need for advising undergraduates and matching them with faculty willing to take them into the laboratory.

“A problem is that we have hundreds of students who would profit from experience in the research lab,” Nelson says, “and maybe one-quarter of them get that experience. To learn a subject, doing it with your own hands is one of the best ways to do that. We need to work out the logistics of that so that there are more of these kinds of opportunities. It’s a problem we can solve.”

Nelson’s CBE agenda includes finding ways to “counterbalance the pressure on young faculty not to teach. We know it’s very hard to get a lab up and going, but if young faculty don’t get interested in teaching at an early stage in their careers, they probably never will,” Nelson says.

“We need to grab these young faculty members the second they get on campus and say, “This is important. You need to do this. Let us help you.'”

Nelson cites CBE’s tradition of working closely with K-12 teachers, saying he hopes to build on that success to expand the network of teachers and students who benefit from the center’s innovative programs.

“Every time you make one middle school teacher better, you have a tremendous impact,” he says. “If you want people to be excited about science and do well in college, you have to get to them before they get here.”