Episode 09 - Kelly Culhane & Larry Bowman
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Joining me today are Kelly Culhane and Larry Bowman. After graduating from St. Olaf College, Kelly entered the PhD program here at Yale and is now a 4th year PhD candidate in the Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry where she studies the structure and function of the parathyroid hormone 1 receptor. Also joining me is Larry Bowman, a 3rd year PhD candidate in David Post’s lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Before coming to Yale, Larry attended Dartmouth College and earned his Masters of Science at East Tennessee State University where he studied the effects of climate change on freshwater copepods.
Kelly and Larry have dedicated much time and effort to improving STEM education at Yale, serving as Graduate Teaching Fellows through the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). CTL Fellows lead programming on effective and innovative teaching, and develop teaching resources for graduate teaching fellows to hone their craft. Both of my guests discuss their trajectories to STEM education, share some advice for incorporating inclusive teaching practices, and describe their innovative Teaching as Research (TAR) project focusing on improving the introductory biology course sequence, BIOL101-104, here at Yale.
When prompted to discuss the ever-challenging task of ensuring that STEM classrooms welcome students of all backgrounds, Kelly and Larry both spoke eloquently about the importance of humanizing the scientific endeavor:
“One thing that I think has been really important is mentoring, and having role models available. Whether it’s older students in the department, whether it’s graduate students mentoring undergrads […] if there are faculty that are able to take undergrads into the lab and have meaningful relationships in the lab. And I think that’s really powerful—having personal relationships with scientists to see that they’re not just robotic, objective 'only-do-science' people.”
- Kelly Culhane
“It’s important to encourage people who don’t think of themselves as 'native scientists'—who didn’t know that they were scientists since birth—that we still need good writers in science, we still need good communicators in science. And that we don’t live in an envelope where those people aren’t wanted. One of the things that I always tell my students is that I was an English major, and I became a biology double major later on. We don’t all start growing up that we’re mathematicians or scientists.”
- Larry Bowman
Links
Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale