Back in January 2021, Hannah Parker reached out about joining the research lab. We were still living the pandemic, and Hannah, who was a health care studies major, was doing her studies remotely. I had just finished teaching Biochemistry lecture to my biggest class ever because no one was studying abroad. We were in a huge room in the admissions building with many students joining remotely. I had a crazy idea to build a map that overlay genetic disorders with metabolic pathways commonly studied in the biochemistry classroom. Since I started, I have always had an activity at the end of the semester that linked these two concepts together but there isn’t a great online resource for them. So, on a whim, I pitched the idea to Hannah – it was crazy and I had no idea how to implement it – and she jumped on it. She researched the pathways and the disorders, she investigated different programs, she reached outside of our building to talk to folks in the Spatial Analysis lab, and she worked full time for 2 summers in addition to the rest of her semesters on campus. She even worked on analyzing the students’ feedback and writing, editing, and revising the manuscript since graduation. And finally the project has been published in the Journal of Chemical Education. See the manuscript here and a link to the online resource here.
Thank you to Hannah for really taking my idea and bringing it to fruition. Thank you to Beth who helped us upload and build the Explorer in ArcGIS. Thank you to the CHEM 326 students who evaluated it and gave feedback. Thank you to the University of Richmond for supporting Hannah’s summer fellowships. I am grateful to be at a place that values the intersection of research and teaching and encourages me to follow all my crazy ideas!
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