Interdisciplinary Themes of the Wesleyan Hughes Program

The primary goal of our program is to improve undergraduate education in the life sciences. The program places special emphasis on two areas of interdisciplinary teaching and research:

(i) Biology in Society, which we define as the relationship between the life sciences and public policy, bioethics, conservation and environmental biology;

(ii) Bioinformatics, defined broadly as the integration of the analytical power of mathematics and information sciences into the life sciences.
These are brought together by our new program in Integrative Genomic Sciences (IGS)

Biology in Society (Bioethics and Public Policy) is increasingly important in considerations of many areas of biology, including genetic engineering, genetically modified foods, reproductive biology, genetic counseling, cloning of embryos, and stem cell biology. This area can also be extended to encompass issues in management of the environment and conservation biology. Bioethics and Public Policy is also increasingly a career option for our life science majors (either in government or law). Improving education in bioethics and public policy is a goal of our program. Initiatives include:

Summer Colloquia: As part of our Hughes Summer Program, we hold seminars and mini-symposia to explore different aspects of this theme.

Conservation Biology: With HHMI support, our Biology department has hired a new faculty member in the area of population biology and conservation biology.

This is an exciting time in biology. In the "post-genomic" era, bioinformatics is a area that is increasingly important in the life sciences, and is a new career direction for our life science majors. In addition to bringing in expertise in bioinformatics in future faculty hires, we are increasing research and curriculum offerings in this area by current faculty.   We will work toward this goal with several initiatives:

Dual mentored summer research: To encourage cross-fertilization between fields, we have a separately budgeted component of the summer undergraduate research program earmarked for students who are jointly mentored by two faculty in complementing fields. The dual mentored research scholarships will encourage faculty and students to explore ways in which their research can benefit from interdisciplinary combinations of fields such as bioinformatics.

Summer Symposia and Workshops: We have focused several of our summer program symposia and workshops on aspects of bioinformatics, ranging from genomics to structural modeling.
Please also see Integrative Genomic Sciences at Wesleyan.