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“Everyone in science is waking up to the fact that students need hands-on lab experience,” says Kristen DeAngelis, professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. DeAngelis, whose specialty involves understanding the role soil microbes play in the cycling of carbon through soil, plants and the atmosphere, is also a dedicated teacher whose hands-on approach to undergraduate education was recently featured by the American Society for Microbiology in a series of six open-access, peer-reviewed journal articles—written by DeAngelis’s students themselves.

DeAngelis’s goal is to have students do real scientific work, from developing a hypothesis, researching and testing it and then writing up the results. What sets DeAngelis’s teaching apart is that, instead of simulating lab work in class, her students actually do the same sort of work, and publishing in the same peer-reviewed journals, as DeAngelis and her PhD-holding colleagues. In this case, DeAngelis’s students are mapping the entire genomes of individual microbes, and in the process, discovering new species previously unknown to science.

“I’ve been wanting to teach a class like this ever since I came to UMass Amherst,” says DeAngelis, “and I finally got to develop it as part of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award that I received in 2018.” 

The CAREER award supported DeAngelis with $945,000 over five years in part to teach cohorts of undergraduate microbiology students to annotate soil microbe genomes, map traits and carry out other investigations into how soil microbes respond to a warming climate.

From there, DeAngelis developed a class in which she first teaches her students the programming skills they’ll need to assemble, annotate and analyze the sequence of a microbe’s genome—which is built from up to 10 million base pairs. But the technical skills are not enough to make inferences about their mystery organisms: the students also need to develop skills in courage, persistence and collaboration. Students read through the scientific literature in order to generate and test a hypothesis about how the organisms make their living, while they learn how to learn new skills working independently and as part of a team.

“This is real, cutting-edge science,” says DeAngelis, who then coaches the students as they write up their results and submit the ensuing papers to the journal Microbiology Resource Announcements for peer review, editing, and if their science checks out, publication.

“This is a powerful educational experience on so many levels,” says DeAngelis. “My students are learning how to ask questions and then solve a problem; they’re learning that they can contribute to the work of science; and they’re learning the sorts of real-world skills that they can take with them as they pursue scientific careers.”