Rachel Cox spent the tail end of her biology for non-majors class delving into the intricacies of global climate change. Cox, a sophomore, wrapped up the course taught by senior biology lecturer Dan Johnson with a final presentation this week.

While many students have taken Johnson’s course before, Cox’s experience this spring was unique. She was one of a handful of students asked to test out a new kind of e-textbook as the sole take-home educational resource for a semester.

BioBook is an electronic learning tool that offers content in an unconventional way. Unlike the thick and convoluted textbook of old, BioBook is accessible by smart-phone, tablet or computer. Developed by Wake Forest researchers, it breaks down complex and lengthy topics into small, manageable chunks of knowledge that can be changed and updated as educators see fit. It also provides students instant access to multimedia from national research organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in addition to traditional text, class lectures and practice quizzes.

“If a page uses an unfamiliar word, there’s usually a hyperlink on the word that will lead to its definition,” Cox said. “Features like this make it better than many of the textbooks I’ve used in the past.”

Within three years, the approximately $30 BioBook is expected to replace the $200+ paper textbooks of up to 1,200 students taking general biology at Wake Forest and Forsyth Technical Community College. More students and schools are expected join the initiative as well, said Johnson, BioBook’s principal developer.

The new collaborative initiative officially kicked off this semester. It will be incorporated into a multi-state $15 million Department of Labor initiative (led by Forsyth Tech) to help displaced workers find a new home in the 21st century workforce.

“We particularly appreciate that BioBook can be offered to students at little to no cost,” said Michael Ayers, dean of Forsyth Tech’s Math Science and Technology Division. “This is important because many students struggle to purchase science books that may cost hundreds of dollars.”

Ayers said the new initiative is part of a longstanding relationship between Wake Forest and Forsyth Tech. For example, Forsyth Tech’s nanotechnology students learn how to work with electron microscopes at Wake Forest.

“We hope to continue to strengthen our partnership by helping to improve BioBook and by working together to produce other science books,” Ayers said.

Johnson said BioBook takes material and content developed in a biology for non-majors class and puts it into a malleable and easy-to-access format so that educators, regardless of institution, can use the material and evaluate it as they see fit. “So rather than constantly reinventing the wheel,” he said. “If something works, it is already in a sharing and ready to go format.”

Johnson and Jim Curran, chair of Department of Biology at Wake Forest, both used BioBook as the sole resource for their biology for non-majors classes. Slides, lecture notes, and supplemental material were added to the book’s data bank as the semester went on, giving students a wealth of new information to choose from, Curran said. “It is something I think students find very helpful and I plan on using in future classes.”

Perhaps the most useful aspect of BioBook will be its adaptability. Johnson said it will enable both teachers and researchers to track what learning tools worked for students at the end of the semester. Educators can then use this data to hone future lesson plans based on what is most effective for their particular brand of student.

“The BioBook by definition is a big data set generator,” Johnson said. “If you see that a particular resource isn’t working or doesn’t fit the way a particular group of students likes to learn, then you can change it.”

Johnson said BioBook has the potential to tackle some of the big questions emerging around the 21st century classroom-like whether or not to incorporate social media as a learning tool. “The data is going to allow us to ask these really interesting questions that will help to improve electronic learning materials in the classroom,” he said.

As for Cox, she said she would like to see more reading intensive classes adopt a similar platform in the future. She said it would not only be useful from an academic standpoint but would also save her some cash. “The total cost of my textbooks would be under $100 if some of my other classes did this; last semester it would’ve been almost cut in half.”

Wake Forest University’s Sean Hannah and a team of researchers have found measuring activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain can help assess that person’s potential for leadership –which could have a big impact on how future leaders are tested and trained.

“This study represents a fusion of the leadership and neuroscience fields, and this fusion can revolutionize approaches to assessing and developing leaders,” says Hannah, the Tylee Wilson Chair in business ethics and professor of management at the Wake Forest University School of Business. Hannah is lead author of the paper in the May 2013 Journal of Applied Psychology titled, “The Psychological and Neurological Bases of Leader Self-Complexity and Effects on Adaptive Decision-Making.”

Hannah and four colleagues tested 103 young military leaders between the ranks of officer cadet and major at a U.S. Army base on the east coast. They administered psychological exams to assess the complexity of leaders’ identities, and neurological exams to assess the complexity of soldiers’ brain activity. For the brain tests, the researchers attached quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) electrodes to 19 areas of the soldier’s scalp.

Hannah and his fellow researchers wanted to know if great leaders had more complex brains – measured by the electrodes which reported which parts of the brain were firing together at the same time. A low complex brain shows more areas of the brain operating at the same time at the same electrical amplitude and frequency – which suggests those areas converge to process the same task leaving fewer brain resources for other tasks and processes. It’s a process called “phase lock.”

But in high complex brains, the activity patterns are much more different and varied – which suggests more of the brains resources are available at any one time to handle other situations or tasks.

“Think of it as a single core versus a multicore computer’s central processing unit (CPU),” Hannah says. “A multicore CPU can multitask because one core can process a task while the other CPU cores remain free to process new tasks. More complex brains are also more efficient in locking together only the brain resources needed to process a task and then efficiently releasing them when no longer needed.”

The study showed the high complex brains of the great leaders had a different “landscape.” The scans showed more differentiated activation patterns in the frontal and prefrontal lobes of leaders who demonstrated greater decisiveness, adaptive thinking and positive action orientation in the experiment.

“Further, individuals who have developed richer and more elaborate self-concepts as leaders were found to be more complex and adaptable,” Hannah says. “These findings have important implications for identifying and developing leaders who can lead effectively in today’s changing, dynamic, and often volatile organizational contexts.”

The researcher team suggests that once they validate neurological profiles of leaders with high complex brains, they will be able to use established techniques like neuro-feedback to enhance these leadership skills in others. Neuro-feedback has been successfully used with elite athletes, concert musicians and financial traders in their training. These profiles can also be used to assess leaders and track their development over time.

These findings have relevance to the WFU Schools of Business’ new student development framework, which focuses on developing practical wisdom, strategic thinking and critical thinking skills, along with the ability to embrace complexity and ambiguity.

Hannah’s co-authors include Pierre Balthazard, dean of the School of Business at Saint Bonaventure University; David A. Waldman, professor of business at Arizona State University; Peter L. Jennings, of the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic at West Point; and Robert W. Thatcher of the University of South Florida.

This research team is at the forefront of applying neuroscience to study effective leadership. The team previously published a 2012 paper in the Leadership Quarterly, which identified unique brain functioning in leaders who are seen by their followers as highly inspirational and charismatic.

Janelle Leuthaeuser is on the cutting edge of biophysics. A molecular genetics and genomics Ph.D. student, she is part of a nationwide effort to create a more efficient generation of protein-based drugs.

Proteins are the worker bees of cells. They get rid of waste, transmit cellular signals and carry out the chemical reactions that keep our bodies running. The biomolecules’ role as intracellular regulators and their sheer number (there are about 7,000 different types of protein molecules in a typical human body cell) also make them one of the most frequent targets of drugs.

Drugs can help your body fight off disease and infection by speeding up or altering the chemical reactions regulated by proteins. Around half of the drugs currently on the market work by targeting proteins.

Researchers have identified millions of proteins and are discovering new ones faster than ever before. The problem, when it comes to making new and better drugs, is that two proteins can have a similar structure or genetic sequence but react very differently to the same chemical compound. This can lead to adverse drug side effects that range from mildly discomforting to potentially life-threatening. In fact, more than three million serious adverse reactions to prescription drugs occur every year. There are more than 100,000 deaths from these reactions per year, placing prescription drug use as the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, ahead of pulmonary disease, diabetes, AIDS and pneumonia.

“The more information we can get about how specific proteins function the better we can target them with drugs,” Leuthaeuser said. “We have the technology to identify a lot of new proteins now, but not to efficiently identify the details of their molecular function.”

She is working with Jacquelyn Fetrow, Reynolds Professor of Computational Biophysics and Dean of the College, and a national team of researchers to develop an automated program that classifies different proteins by their active site, the location where chemical reactions occur. Contemporary technologies predict protein function based on the full sequence or structure of protein molecules. The Wake Forest led team found this method often vaguely or incorrectly classifies proteins. Leuthaeuser said that proteins can be grouped together by function more accurately when using the sequence and structure directly surrounding the active site rather than the overall structure of a protein molecule.

“When proteins have less than 30-40 percent sequence identity, it is more helpful to look at just the active sites,” Leuthaeuser said. “We can more accurately predict their function when we are looking at this small area.”

A simple example of how the active site information can be applied in developing more efficient drugs is with aspirin. Leuthaeuser said aspirin affects two similar proteins – COX 1 and COX 2 – that do two very different things. COX 2 is involved with general pain and inflammation while COX 1 regulates swelling in the gastrointestinal tract. Aspirin inhibits both COX 1 and COX 2.

“This is why taking aspirin can give you an upset stomach,” Leuthaeuser said. “We would like to inhibit just COX 2 and not COX 1. “There are differences in the active sites of COX 1 and COX 2 that allow drugs to be targeted to COX 2 selectively, decreasing the potential gastrointestinal side effects.”

Leuthaeuser is in the process of characterizing active site information for a group of structurally diverse proteins using a computer program developed by members of the Fetrow Lab. While the project is in an early testing and validation stage, she said the eventual hope is that utilizing active site profiling technology will enable accurate and efficient protein function prediction. This could in turn assist pharmaceutical researchers in designing drugs with fewer adverse effects.

Patsy Babbitt, a professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, has been working with Fetrow on models to predict protein function for five years and is a collaborator on the project. She said automated systems like this will not only make it easier to develop drugs with fewer side effects but will greatly speed up the process of drug development in general. Until recently, Babbitt said the only way to efficiently and accurately identify protein function at the necessary level of molecular detail was to examine them one by one in the lab, a painstakingly slow process that requires a significant amount of time for each protein and costs a significant amount of money.

She said the goal is to bring the time down from a few years to a few weeks.

“The precision will not be as good as individual experiments,” Babbitt, said. “But, it will take much less time and money to build an infrastructure to help other scientists form hypotheses and identify the details of protein functional sites.”

A few years ago, the idea of 3-D printing a major body organ like a kidney was unthinkable, but now scientists eye North Carolina as a national hub for human organs partly due to regenerative medicine research at Wake Forest University.  Medical advances in biotechnology seem to be coming faster than the public can understand them all or even discuss how society should handle ethical, legal and moral considerations.

To spark the national conversation, Wake Forest has partnered with Baylor University to host “After the Genome: The Language of our Biotechnological Future” April 12-13. Fourteen scholars from across North America with expertise in medicine, science, religion and communication will present, including:

• Baylor University President Ken Starr;
• Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine Dr. Anthony Atala;
• Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values at Dartmouth Ronald M. Green;
• Ezra E.H. Griffith, Professor of Psychiatry and African-American Studies, Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at Yale School of Medicine 

“There is a rising awareness that the way we talk about science, biotechnology and medical miracles is not neutral, but suggests agendas,” Michael Hyde, Distinguished Professor of Communication Ethics at Wake Forest and conference organizer said. “And this national conversation will help shape public expectations regarding medical science. How far can we stretch science to give us longer or better lives through medical miracles? And if we use the word miracle, should we consider the religious implications of biotechnological advances?”

In many conferences, the papers presented are compiled into a publication afterward, but in this case, the book comes first. Wake Forest and Baylor University Press have worked for nearly two years to produce a book of essays containing the scholarship of the thought leaders who will present at the conference. That book will be available at the conference. 

“Everybody is a moral agent,” said Nancy King, co-director of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society. “Academics don’t have any special corner on figuring out what the right thing to do is, but we can help to deepen and broaden public discussion. Science is extremely important and medicine is extremely important, but they’re not going to solve all the world’s problems. What’s going to solve all the world’s problems is how society makes use of science.”

The conference will end with a debate between Wake Forest and Baylor’s collegiate debate teams, using the presentations given over the two-day event as evidence and materials for discussion. Both schools trace their debate team histories back to the 1850s and have national titles under their belts, so it should be a spirited conversation.

Beyond the language, biotechnology has enormous economic implications. North Carolina is third in the nation behind California and Massachusetts when it comes to the life-science industrial sector and it generates $59 billion in economic activity, according to a recent study.

The Office of the Provost, Department of Communications, Humanities Institute and the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society at Wake Forest University, along with the Provost’s Fund, Baylor University Press and the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University have organized the event. 

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but this might not be the case for a honeybee.

Just ask David Hale (’15), a sophomore biology major. Hale has been studying the relationship between brain structure and cognitive function in honeybees since the summer after his freshman year.

He explains that as a honeybee ages, a pair of structures in its brain called mushroom bodies grow larger. Larger mushroom bodies may give older bees an advantage over their younger counterparts when it comes to learning and memorizing new things like the color of certain flowers. In nature, this would help older honeybees remember which flowers have more pollen, making them better foragers for the hive.

Hale went to biology professor and honeybee expert Susan Fahrbach to see if she would help him design a scientific study to investigate the phenomena.

With Fahrbach’s guidance, Hale designed a basic IQ test to see if older bees’ enlarged mushroom bodies make them more adept at associating color with reward.

After collecting bees of different ages and fitting them into a harness fashioned from a drinking straw, Hale exposed his tiny subjects to bursts of blue or green light from a projector to simulate different colored flower patches.

A flash of blue light signaled a sugary reward. A flash of green light signaled no reward. Hale put each bee through 20 trials and then reversed the experiment. His results showed that of the 64 bees that completed the test, older ones proved more capable at associating color with reward. The younger bees, the ones less than 10 days old, weren’t yet ready to learn.

Hale said putting together the experiment under Fahrbach’s guidance was the most challenging aspect of his collegiate career to date. His mentor took an available, yet hands-off approach, which allowed Hale to learn from his own mistakes.

“Instead of telling me what to do, professor Fahrbach told me to think outside of the box and come up with my own solution to the problems at hand,” Hale said.

From Honeybees to Humans: Meeting of the Minds

It is exactly this outside the box thinking that will be showcased at the Eighth Annual ACC Meeting of the Minds Undergraduate Research Conference, taking place April 4-6 at Wake Forest.

The three-day event, funded in large part by revenue from athletic events such as the ACC football championship, will showcase the work of nearly 100 undergraduate researchers from 12 ACC member schools.

“We are breaking down barriers between a group of the nation’s leading universities so that students from across the ACC can learn from one another and grow through shared experience,” said Richard Carmichael, professor of mathematics at Wake Forest and the University’s Faculty Athletic Representative.

Susan Fahrbach in the lab with David Hale.

Undergraduate REsearch and Creative Activities (URECA) Center, the Office of the Dean of the College and the Office of the Provost are organizing and sponsoring the event, which rotates from campus to campus each year.

“We are proud to celebrate the mentored or independent scholarship of such talented students from Wake Forest and other ACC institutions renowned for their commitment to scholarly and creative work and their dedication to outstanding undergraduate education,” said Jacquelyn Fetrow, Dean of Wake Forest College.

The URECA Center provides student grants (summer fellowships include $4,000 plus housing) and an administrative umbrella for mentored, undergraduate research and encourages and supports high-quality programs of great impact. Shannon Mihalko, associate professor of Health and Exercise Science and Co-Director of the URECA Center, said the program supports undergraduate scholars in all disciplines of Wake Forest College.

This year’s “Meeting of the Minds” also represents the first-ever ACC-sponsored event including the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Louisville.

“The expectation for undergraduates to participate in research has become standard for admittance into good graduate schools,” said Dale B. Billingsley, vice provost of Undergraduate Affairs and Enrollment Management at the University of Louisville. “Starting early is a really good thing to do for students who will be participating in research events like this for the rest of their careers.”

Josh Courtney, an English and political science major, will showcase his work analyzing linguistic trends in the writing of first-year Wake Forest students. He said working with his mentor Laura Aull, an assistant professor of English, not only gave him a realistic idea of what it is like to do research but also has him considering a PhD in linguistics after graduation.

“You don’t realize the amount of time and effort that goes into this kind of work until you do it,” Courtney said, adding that professor Aull is helping him to get his work published in an academic journal.

If you are going to attend

A complete schedule of events is available on the conference website. Wake Forest faculty known for their dedication to undergraduate research will give keynote addresses.

Friday’s keynote speaker will be Miles Silman, Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest. A leader in the sustainability movement, Silman has taken dozens of undergraduate students to the Amazon rainforest, where his work centers on understanding species distributions, biodiversity, and the response of forest ecosystems to climate and land use changes over time.

Saturday’s keynote speaker will be Christina Soriano, Associate Professor of Dance. Her mentee, senior Cynthia Huang, will dance to demonstrate their collaborative work on composer John Cage, which Soriano will address in her presentation called “Choreographing Cage: A model for undergraduate scholarship in the arts.”

As Congress considers comprehensive immigration reform this spring, new research by assistant professor of sociology Hana Brown shows the language used in the immigration debates can be as important as the legislation and can have long-term effects on other policies.

“Most of our attention is going to be on the laws up for debate,” Brown says.  “My study suggests that we should also pay close attention to the language political leaders use to justify those policies, in particular which groups they say are deserving and undeserving of different rights.”

Brown’s research and her classes bridge the space between politics and sociology.

Her new study, published in the April issue of The American Sociological Review, shows that in Arizona and California during the 1990s, the tenor of earlier immigration debates directly affected welfare reform battles later. “If lawmakers talk about immigration as a racial issue and argue that Hispanics are undeserving, this divisive rhetoric can easily translate into restrictive welfare policies.  On the other hand, if they discuss immigration as an issue of legal status and praise legal immigrants, that language unifies rather than divides diverse groups.  It can spur the development of powerful coalitions that can continue to affect policymaking even after immigration debates have ended.”

Le ’Ron Byrd, a junior sociology and philosophy major from Alaska, took Brown’s introduction to sociology course and then signed up for her political sociology course. He is now working as a research assistant on her next project:  looking at why some states—Alabama and Georgia—have passed restrictive anti-immigrant laws in recent years while others — North Carolina and Mississippi — have not.

“Dr. Brown knew I had an interest in making a difference in communities and in racial issues in the United States,” Byrd said. As part of his work with Brown, he attended a professional conference, The Southeast Summit: Forging a New Consensus on Immigrants and gained insight into the role immigrants and immigration play in the regional economy and how problems in the immigration system affect communities.

Several other students are also working with Brown on her research related to immigration issues and welfare programs.  Dianne Uwayo, a sophomore sociology major from Rwanda, is reviewing Congressional hearings on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and the food stamp program and examining potential patterns in legislative arguments for and against the programs.

“I think there is this assumption that once the debates are over, our immigration discussions are done,” said Brown, who will continue exploring how the way arguments are framed, in legal or racial terms, affects support for other policies. “The language that we use now is going to be a resource that people can draw on even after this current legislative debate winds down.”

Byrd admires Brown as a scholar and as a teacher and said Brown’s passion for teaching each student makes her distinctive. “After my third week in her class, I was sure I was her favorite student just by how she reached out to me through e-mail and our discussions during office hours,” he said. “However, I learned very soon after that this was how she interacted with every student.”

With plans for a career in family law, Byrd also credits Brown for encouraging him to become a public engagement fellow at Wake Forest and a Guardian Ad Litem (child advocate) volunteer in Winston-Salem.

Maggie Payne is helping to develop a new generation of flexible electronics.

A junior physics major, Payne is part of a team of researchers at Wake Forest University’s Organic Electronics group studying the relation between the physical structure and electrical properties of organic semiconductor crystals. The team’s work is contributing to advances in organic semiconductor technology that could one day lead to video screens that bend like paper and electronics sewn into clothing.

Payne grows crystals in the lab and applies them to semiconductors to test how well they conduct electricity. She said modeling and theoretical findings predict the compounds she is growing could have a variety of electrical properties ranging from bipolarity to superconductivity.

Payne said she owes her early involvement in cutting edge research to her mentor, Oana Jurchescu, an assistant professor of physics and director of the research team. “Dr. Jurchescu has inspired me as a strong female physicist,” Payne said. “Working in her lab group is one of the best experiences I have had at Wake Forest.”

Jurchescu mentors many graduate and undergraduate students like Payne, who are interested in conducting research on organic semiconductors and pursuing careers in science. Her work both in the classroom with students and in the lab was recently recognized with a $400,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the most prestigious national award the NSF offers a few select junior faculty who excel as teacher-scholars. Jurchescu said her team will use the money to elucidate the intrinsic characteristics of single crystals and provide feedback for the development of novel, high-tech electronics and thin film devices.

(From left) Jurchescu with graduate students Jeremy Ward and Katelyn Goetz in the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.

Current technology utilizes inorganic semiconducting materials like silicon, which are expensive and limited in their application because they must be processed in a vacuum at high temperatures. Compared to these materials, organic semiconductors are less expensive, easier to process, and more versatile. “Fast deposition at up to a hundred feet per second may allow their production in large volumes and at low cost per unit area, an introduction of ‘electronics everywhere,” Jurchescu said.

Examples of the potential technology include transparent solar cells on building windows, car roofs and bus stations, electronic displays in previously inaccessible spaces, and wearable electronics due to the organic plastics’ thin, lightweight and conformal nature.

The NSF CAREER Award recognizes and encourages excellent teaching, mentorship and community outreach. In line with these objectives, Jurchescu will offer a new course focused on carbon-based materials and devices, tentatively scheduled for the 2014-2015 academic year. She will give demonstrations on nanotechnology to children at Nanodays at Sciworks, a science and environmental center in Winston-Salem, and host research projects in her lab for motivated high school students and students from Forsyth Tech Community College as well.

Additionally, Jurchescu will continue to mentor Wake Forest students like Payne, who said she owes her decision to follow a career path in physics to her mentor.

“She not only has an extensive understanding of the material but is equipped with the skills of communicating her knowledge,” Payne said. “She may or may not know this, but Dr. Jurchescu’s Electronics course was the reason I became a physics major. She is a role model to me a both a woman and a physicist.”

When Jeffrey Katula and his research colleagues set out to determine if they could help prevent patients from developing diabetes using group-based problem solving, he didn’t expect such drastic results.

At the end of the two-year project, called the Healthy Living Partnerships to Prevent Diabetes (HELP PD) Study, the participants had lost about the same amount of weight and produced similar low fasting blood-sugar levels as participants in an earlier benchmark study – which cost nearly three times as much.

The results of the research, “The HELP PD Study: 2-year effects on fasting blood glucose, insulin, and adiposity,” appear online in advance of print publication in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, along with a cost analysis of the program. The project was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Wake Forest University, Wake Forest School of Medicine and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, led by principal investigator Mara Vitolins of the medical school, conducted the research.

“Traditional behavioral weight loss programs rely a lot on education – how to exercise, how to read food labels,” said Katula, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science and lead author of the paper. “Our program decreased the emphasis on didactic education and instead focused on a problem-solving, empowerment-based model. Participants talked about what things were getting in the way of losing weight, then they worked as a group to determine ways to overcome the barriers.”

The end result was that HELP PD participants lost an average of nearly 13 pounds, and kept it off over the two years of the study; weight loss is a key factor in preventing and controlling diabetes.

And because the program was administered at the grass-roots level by community health workers in local recreation centers, the cost of the care was $850 per person. In the benchmark study, the Diabetes Prevention Program, cost of care was $2,631 per person.

“A new, effective, low-cost treatment for diabetics and pre-diabetics would bring the cost down substantially for an enormous threat to U.S. and global public health,” said Michael Lawlor, director of the Health Policy and Administration Program in the Department of Economics and lead author of the HELP PD cost-effectiveness paper.

In early March, the American Diabetes Association estimated the total costs of diagnosed diabetes, including hospital inpatient care, medications, diabetes supplies, physician office visits and nursing facility stays, had risen to $245 billion per year in 2012. The ADA last reported annual costs of diabetes in 2007, when the total was $174 billion.

HELP PD recruited more than 300 participants who were guided through the weight-loss program by community health workers (CHWs) – residents who had a history of healthy lifestyles and well-controlled diabetes. The CHWs were paid a minimal amount – $100 per week to lead weekly group meetings for the first six months, and then $200 a month for the remainder of the study. They were trained by registered dieticians in the community, and had very little contact with researchers or other high-level experts.

“We wanted to harness as much existing community resources and systems as possible, and reduce the role of study resources and study personnel,” Katula said. “We wanted to know, could we accomplish what was accomplished in the original study at a lower cost? Not every community has access to a diabetes investigator – so could we develop a program that could run in any community in the country, even without access to expertise?”

The research team is now testing the program in five county health departments in North Carolina to determine if Medicaid can save money using this model.

“The Medicaid program could be interested in expanding reimbursement for diabetes prevention programs to community health workers,” Katula said. “If we could help more people avoid developing diabetes, it would reduce the need to pay for diabetes care down the line.”

You could say Samuel Murphy is one measure of computer science professor Jennifer Burg’s success.

Burg set out to determine whether using a hands-on topic like music could help her teach complicated computer science topics such as algorithms, abstraction and programming languages.

Murphy, a sophomore from Fort Worth, Texas, took her CSC101 class – and decided to major in computer science.

“It was my first experience with computer science and I was enthralled by it,” he said. “I would not consider myself a science person, but what interested me most was the problem-solving aspect of it. Every program can be seen as a puzzle, and some bits of code may frustrate you until you think steam is coming out of your ears. I enjoy the challenge.”

That was the ultimate goal of Burg’s research. The results of the study she did with partners Jason Romney of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and sound designer and audio engineer Eric Schwartz, “Computer Science ‘Big Ideas’ Play Well in Digital Sound and Music,” will be published during the upcoming Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education conference, March 6-9 in Denver. The study was funded through two National Science Foundation grants totaling $690,638.

She said several students have chosen computer science as a major since taking one of her revamped digital media classes. But to fully engage them, she said she had to “doubly flip” the classroom.

Where she used to make reading assignments, and then lecture, followed by a test, she now starts her course with hands-on use of the tools. Then she assigns textbook readings, followed by a quiz. After that, the students again use the technology, such as applications including Audacity and Sonar – but this time, they have a project or exercise to complete, instead of just trying to get the technology to work.

“If you give the students a lot more ownership and allow them to pursue their ideas rather than direct them too closely, you get much better results because they are so creative and they have great ideas,” she said. “But it’s scary teaching. I’ve gotten over thinking I have to answer every single question they have. It’s so liberating.”

And it seems to work.

Across the board, students in Burg’s Digital Sound and Media course reported increased understanding of such topics as sampling and quantization; sound synthesis for MIDI; and aliasing. On average, those students also showed increased aptitude and interest in electronics, physics and math, among other topics.

“Students don’t learn linearly anymore,” Burg said. “They are of a much more need-to-know nature, because there is so much more information out there. It’s accessible in a web-like fashion, and they go out there and learn what they need to know when they need to know it.

“Educators need to fill in the gaps between those webs of information, without boring the students.”

As sophomores declare their majors this week, some may wonder if an interest in science and research predestines them to life in a lab or years of post-graduate professional school.

Not necessarily, said Ryan Daly, a senior chemistry major from Cohasset, Mass., whose college-to-career journey has been anything but a linear path.

Though he has taken many science classes and been involved in multiple scientific research projects, Daly has accepted a full-time job as a strategy and operations federal analyst at Deloitte Consulting. In this position, he will help find solutions for policy issues and business problems.

Daly, who had originally intended to purse a Ph.D. in chemistry, spent this past summer working with chemistry professor and Associate Provost for Research Bruce King on a project that studied the relationship between nitroxyl and hydrogen sulfide, two signaling molecules thought to interact inside the cardiovascular system. Understanding how they work together could lead to new ways of treating cardiovascular diseases. Daly has continued to study these molecules and is currently writing an honors thesis on his experiments.

“Conducting research at Wake Forest and the medical school has been both challenging and rewarding, but it wasn’t until I simultaneously pursued my interests in sustainability and entrepreneurship that I imagined possibilities outside the lab,” said Daly.

Senior Ryan Daly talks with chemistry professor Dilip Kondepudi.

Last semester, Daly’s changed his career plans after taking a class with the Thurman D. Kitchin Professor of Chemistry Dilip Kondepudi called “Green Technologies and Entrepreneurship,” which explores innovative energy solutions. During this class, he worked with other students on a futuristic research project that estimated the energy needs of a fleet of autonomous cars.

This project required critical thinking and mathematical calculations to create a computer program that used various models, based on a range of potential scenarios, to minimize energy losses. The idea is that an entire community could be transported by a fleet of autonomous cars controlled by a computer system that relied on models Daly and his classmates created to meet transportation needs and simultaneously improve energy efficiency.

Inspired by the application of his research, problem solving and social entrepreneurship experience for this project, Daly decided to pursue a career in consulting. Though not initially what he envisioned doing after college, Daly now thinks that consulting is a natural fit for him.

“In chemistry there are a lot of different models you have to understand. These models only explain certain things and work in certain areas. It is the same way in the consulting industry,” he said. “Economics can get really complicated with the mixing of different industries and different governmental policies. Like chemistry, it requires an ability to cope with the complexity and know what model to apply.”

“Wake Forest students are known for being very focused, and Ryan is no exception,” said Kondepudi. “I was particularly impressed with how he embraced the challenges of the Green Technologies class and found a way to apply his scientific skills to analyze problems for a business. His experience speaks highly to the value of interdisciplinary courses.”

Daly’s advice for sophomores or first-year students still undecided on their major?

“You don’t necessarily need to know what you intend to do after college when declaring your major,” said Daly. “My advice would be to focus on what interests you and find ways to apply what you learn to whatever you decide to pursue.”