Biology professor and students win national competition

May 10, 2016

Gloria Muday

Biology professor Gloria Muday, and students Bethany Pan and Par Ranjbar, both senior biology majors, recently won an international contest, the Plant Teaching Tools competition, sponsored by the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB).

In Muday’s fall semester course, Pan and Ranjbar developed teaching tools (slides and accompanying text) that can be used in high school and college level biology courses to teach about the effects of climate change, drought, and water deficit on plants. Together this team is editing these tools and combining them with active-learning exercises that highlight how agricultural researchers use traditional plant-breeding and genetic engineering approaches to yield plants with increased drought tolerance.

This teaching tool will be peer reviewed and appear in the ASPB published journal entitled “The Plant Cell.”

“Participating in research and contributing to a research focused journal article is a valuable learning process for students,” Muday said. “Developing tools to be used in teaching is a complementary way for students to learn to be teacher-scholars.”