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.

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.”

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.”

“We wanted students to consider the social, psychological and biological aspect of behavior when it comes to important medical decisions,” said Pat Lord, senior lecturer in the biology department and director of the Pre-Health Professions Program. “So I turned to my students and asked them to help develop a series of events designed to start these conversations.”

Her Bio 367 Virology class took on the challenge, coming up with “Dining Dilemmas: Bioethics in the Pre-Health Professions.” It’s a new program designed to encourage students, especially those planning a healthcare career, to talk about medical ethics.

Here’s how it works. One event will be held each semester and Wake Forest students who attend four events will receive a certificate at a special spring dinner.

The first event was held November 13, 2012. The 50 or so students who attended watched the movie “Contagion” — a movie about a deadly virus that spreads rapidly. The film includes ethical dilemmas like how to quarantine, when and how to administer a vaccine and how medical professionals stand by their patients.

At dinner afterwards, they talked about ethical decisions that were made by characters in the movie. Each table had a different topic, thanks to Lord’s students who researched particular angles with the help of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society, which also provides funding for the program.

“Bioethics issues are relevant for everyone, but it is especially important for students interested in the health professions to explore these issues,” Ana Iltis, the Center’s director said. “They can begin to appreciate the complexity of some of the questions, to understand the importance of different disciplines in helping us analyze questions and to learn to evaluate difficult topics with their peers.”

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while,” Lord said. “It’s partly inspired by the upcoming MCAT 2015 that will include a new component asking students to use critical thinking skills about bioethics, as well as understanding how behavior leads medical professionals to make certain decisions – and why ethics are so important.”

The events are also designed to build community. It’s a chance for freshmen through seniors to gather socially, but also to develop and use their critical thinking skills outside the classroom.

“Pre-health students usually are so overloaded with science courses that they do not take many classes dealing with medical ethics,” Roger Khouri (‘13) said. “This program gives students a chance to actively engage in an ethical discussion, regardless of their major.”

Yana Klein (‘14), who helped market the event with flyers and Facebook, agrees. “This program is a great way stir some critical thinking in students and expose them to issues that are essential to understand, yet are often neglected,” she said.  “So many Wake Forest students, especially those interest in pre-med/health, are so hard-wired to read straight out of textbooks, get straight As, and build a resume, that many fail to find a real-life application to their field. By integrating pop culture with realistic ethically disturbing scenarios, it makes this program fun and interesting instead of work.”

The students who attended gave the program high marks in a survey and agreed they’d recommend it to friends. They also suggested topics for next semester’s event, ranging from gene therapy to pharmaceutical issues to euthanasia.

Timo Thonhauser, assistant professor of physics, has taken on one of the toughest problems that stands in the way of making hydrogen cars a reality: hydrogen storage.

His research is supported by the most prestigious award the National Science Foundation has to offer for young scientists – the NSF CAREER Award – given to a select few junior faculty nationwide who excel as teacher-scholars. The award comes with a $426,572.00 grant, which Thonhauser will use to determine whether any of three materials – magnesium borohydride, ammonia borane, and special alkanes – could be used to create a safe and efficient storage solution for hydrogen.

“Simply pumping pure hydrogen into pressurized tanks in your car is inefficient and potentially dangerous,” Thonhauser said. “But even if you could, you just cannot get enough of it into the tank – you’d drive for 50 miles, and then your car would stop.”

The NSF CAREER Award, announced in late August, also will allow Thonhauser to expand his role as educator and mentor. As part of the grant, he will set up an interdepartmental mentoring program to help graduate and post-doctoral students improve their research skills and transition to a career in science.

That’s the kind of individualized instruction senior Ashley Anderson said is typical of Thonhauser.

“His class continues to remain one of the most memorable components of my WFU ‘memory bank,’” said Anderson, who took a general physics class with Thonhauser. “His instruction impacted the way in which I interpret and synthesize information, and has remained a vital part of my learning process. But, most importantly, his kindness is a hallmark of this university.”

As part of the CAREER Award, Thonhauser also will work with the SciWorks science center in Winston-Salem to develop an interactive exhibit and related programs about using hydrogen as fuel.

“People in general don’t know enough about alternative fuels, and awareness is an important first step in getting the technology accepted,” he said. “I want to be at the science center – and have some of my students join me there – to help explain problems with our current fossil fuels and possible solutions using hydrogen as an alternative.”

Thonhauser is a condensed matter theorist, using computers to test concepts; he works with other scientists who perform experiments to confirm his findings.

“Today’s technology crucially depends on materials of all kinds,” he said. “For example, if you want to build a new airplane, you want a material that’s light and strong. With the aid of theory – quantum mechanics – I can help you find that material.”

In addition to the hydrogen storage project, his research group is looking at metal organic framework materials that could help capture greenhouse gasses, and nuclear magnetic resonance, which sheds light on the structure of many materials, ranging from water to human DNA.

During the Olympics this summer, you might have read news stories about athletes drinking beet juice to increase their performance, and maybe even describing it as tasting like “sweet dirt.”

Well before the Olympics, Wake Forest University had commissioned the development of a good-tasting beet juice as part of its studies.   Daniel Kim-Shapiro, physicist and director of Wake Forest’s Translational Science Center, will offer beet juice samples for tasting after his talk at the 11^th annual Technology Briefing in Winston-Salem on September 20.

Kim-Shapiro, will also share how Wake Forest researchers have shown for the first time that drinking beet juice can increase regional blood flow to the brain in older adults.  Such a finding could hold potential for combating the progress of dementia in patients. Plus he has other news about how the main ingredient in beet juice – nitrate – has other good benefits for humans.

“The goal of the Tech Briefing is to inform and excite our community about local companies and institutions that are creating innovative technologies, designs and products here in Winston-Salem,” said Bret Marchant of the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce.  “The presenters are the entrepreneurs, designers and researchers who are helping to transform our local economy.”

An estimated 300 to 400 people are expected to attend this year’s briefing organized by the Technology Council of the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce.  Held from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. in the Benton Convention Center, it will open the Chamber’s day-long Business and Innovation Expo, the region’s largest business-to-business tradeshow.  The Tech Briefing is free and open to the public, but the Chamber encourages advance registration on its web site at winstonsalem.com.

Highly regarded for spotlighting new research and products, the briefing is praised by the Winston-Salem Journal for demonstrating that Winston-Salem lives up to the “innovation” part of its slogan—the City of Arts and Innovation.

Kim-Shapiro, Harbert Family Distinguished Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship, will be one of 10 presenters at the briefing and one of four presenters directly associated with or having ties to Wake Forest.

Other presenters with Wake Forest associations include:

• Paul Laurienti, director of the Laboratory for Complex Brain Works at Wake Forest School of Medicine.
• Bob Summers, chief executive officer of Camel City Solar, which is a spin-off of the Wake Forest Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.
• David M. Smitherman, chief executive officer of Orthovative Technologies, which won the 13^th Annual Elevator Competition hosted by Wake Forest Schools of Business this year.  Smitherman is an MBA student in the Schools of Business.   The company is associated with the School of Medicine and the nanotechnology center.

Additional presenters will be B/E Aerospace, Hanesbrands, MD Online Solutions, PMG Research, Snap Crowd and Technology Crops International.

The presenters represent new start-ups, long-established companies and institutions doing groundbreaking research.

“It is a fast-moving event designed to appeal to a broad audience, with each presenter speaking for just five minutes about their innovations,” explained Marchant, director of research and economic development at the Chamber.

Many Wake Forest researchers have presented throughout the history of the Tech Briefings, including last year when Associate Professor of Computer Science Paul Pauca spoke about VerbalVictor, an app to assist children with communication difficulties. Pauca has just been named one of the top 20 innovators by NBCLatino for his work with assisted communication.

Bruce King, associate provost for research at Wake Forest, has long observed Wake Forest’s consistent presence in the Tech Briefings and is especially pleased to see a growing representation of several academic areas in the events.   Represented directly or indirectly in 2012, King noted, are the undergraduate College, the School of Medicine, the Schools of Business and such centers as the Translational Science Center and the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.

“We’ve had a good presence for years, but now I’m impressed by how broad our representation has become,” King said.  “A cross section of our research is evident this year.”

U.S. News and World Report’s 2013 Best Colleges guide ranked Wake Forest University 13th among national universities with the best undergraduate teaching.  The list highlights “schools where the faculty has an unusually strong commitment to undergraduate teaching.”

The 2013 guide ranked Wake Forest 27th among national universities in its overall ranking and also recognized the school for its value and the quality of its undergraduate business programs.  Wake Forest followed three schools tied for 24th – University of California-Los Angeles, University of Southern California and the University of Virginia.

“Undergraduate teaching is at the heart of Wake Forest,” said Wake Forest President Nathan O. Hatch.  “With Wake Forest’s teacher-scholar model, every faculty member is dedicated to excellence in both teaching and research. We appreciate being recognized for the deep faculty-student engagement and the commitment to educating the whole person that are Wake Forest’s highest values.”

Wake Forest had a strong showing in many categories including alumni giving rates, faculty resources and graduation rates.  The guide highlighted Wake Forest’s 11 to 1 student/faculty ratio as well as small class size (57 percent of classes have fewer than 20 students) and high retention rates (94 percent of first-year students returning for sophomore year).

Wake Forest was ranked 25th in last year’s edition and has been ranked in the top 30 in the national universities category since 1996.

Among national universities, Wake Forest was also ranked 33rd on a list of best value schools called “Great Schools, Great Prices.”

The annual guide also ranks undergraduate business programs.  The Wake Forest Accounting program ranked in the top 5% in the nation at #16, and overall the Wake Forest Business School ranked 31st out of 455 undergraduate business schools across the country.

The U.S. News rankings are posted on www.usnews.com.  The Best Colleges 2013 guidebook will be in stores on September 18 and is available at the U.S. News Store.

Students headed back to school at Hanes Magnet School in Winston-Salem will find a whole new subject in some of their English, Spanish, social studies and math classes: computer science.

“Fortune Magazine ranks many computer science careers in their top or fastest-growing lists,” Samuel Cho, assistant professor of physics and computer science said. “Even though we are in a rough economy, computer science graduates are in high demand.”

Cho and fellow computer science professor Paúl Pauca created a two-day workshop for Hanes Magnet School teachers, along with graduate and undergraduate students. The goal: to demonstrate how computer science could be worked into lesson plans across their curriculum. The workshop was made possible with a $5,000 grant from Google, matched by Wake Forest University and recently highlighted as one of the reasons tech website Mashable listed Wake Forest as one of the “top ten campuses for tech.”

“We need to expose young students at the middle school level to computer science,” Cho said. “It’s fundamentally as important as math, English or science.”

The Wake Forest computer science department turned the workshop into a learning opportunity for college students too. Several of them created breakout sessions that taught the middle school educators how to use a basic program called Scratch to create lesson plans for creative writing or to make literature come alive.

“I’ve already figured out a lesson plan to use with Scratch,” Hanes Spanish teacher Yu’Vonne James said. “It’s called ‘games people play’. Students will pretend to be a game company and create Spanish review games for other students to play. They’ll play each others’ games to review what they learned in Spanish.”

James says the workshop will help her accomplish a dream that began when she switched from a computer engineering major during her own undergraduate years. “I’ve always been interested in computer science, but couldn’t figure out how to incorporate it into my Spanish lesson plans. Now I can. We are supposed to be making future-ready students. I tell students they need to study Spanish, there’s not a job they won’t need Spanish for, and it’s the same with computer science.”

Workshop leaders and teachers. Left to right: Samuel Cho, Daniel Findeis, Yu'Vonne James, Paul Pauca, Rick Freedman, Justin Marckel, Courtney Ann Haas, Douglas Young, Kimberly Barr, Andy Obermann, Emily Hudspeth, Jim Weiss, Vicki Watts-Hairston, Tiffany Green, Andrew Proctor, Kelly Kuykendall, Russell Gibson, Katharine Miles Lang, Heming Ge, Gareth Clement-Noyes, and Anqi Zou

Cho says social studies teachers can incorporate computer science history and interesting facts in their lessons. “Many students don’t know that the first computer programmer was a woman – Ada Lovelace. Also, the inventor of the first high-level programming language is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She’s also credited with popularizing “debugging” as a term for fixing computer glitches, inspired by an actual moth found and removed from a troubled computer.”

Andrew Proctor, a computer science graduate student at Wake, helped create a lesson plan that showed teachers how they could create fun quizzes that run on Android phones. “I didn’t get any exposure to computer science until I came to college. Some of our foreign students talk about having computer science in middle school. We need to expose kids to the possibilities – especially when you think about how many of them have smartphones. They’re curious and interested.”

Cho said one of the teachers who attended the workshop emailed him afterward. “She said she went home and shared what she learned with her son who was trying to decide on his major. He adjusted his schedule to add an introductory computer science class and is considering a double major to add to his economics degree.”

Feedback like that from the participants was overwhelmingly positive, and they were particularly impressed with the Wake Forest computer science students who participated. One teacher wrote, “I was very impressed by the well-spoken student volunteers who showed great knowledge, poise, and class. They are the hope for the future!”

Cho says the department hopes to offer the workshop again, and perhaps even expand it to other middle schools. It’s an important mission.

“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the projected number of jobs for computer science majors over the next 10 years is three times higher than the number of students graduating with those degrees,” Cho said. “If there aren’t enough graduates in the United States, those high-paying, skilled jobs will simply go overseas.”

Stephen Prothero, an author and religious scholar named Wake Forest University President Nathan O. Hatch’s “The Democratization of American Christianity” one of the five best books on religion and politics in the Wall Street Journal.