COLUMBIA, Mo. -- High school teachers and students in Missouri will be among the first to benefit from innovative, high tech mapping tools and concepts developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Missouri Botanical Garden. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced today that it will award a $750,000 grant to the MU School of Medicine to develop these concepts and tools and teach students fundamental concepts of human health, biology and medical sciences.
HHMI will support the MU program as part of a national initiative to improve connections between research institutions and their communities. Only 30 other institutions received similar grants through the initiative, and MU was one of just six to receive a maximum grant of $750,000. HHMI used a panel of lead scientists and educators to select grant recipients from 127 proposals representing 42 states.
The MU program, Maps in Medicine, will use geospatial and biological imaging technologies in partnership with K-12 students and teachers in three Missouri school districts the Columbia Public Schools and the Normandy and Parkway School Districts in metropolitan St. Louis. MU researchers will work with educators and students to develop curricular material that uses a current approach and focuses on cell biology, while corresponding with science learning objectives the state has mandated.
Building on students sense of direction and understanding of geospatial mapping such as GIS systems, the educators will engage students in lessons that teach them how structures are determined by DNA and conveyed within cells, causing the cells to move through three-dimensional space much as humans move across the earth and through space.
The basic notion is very simple: young people have a sense of direction and navigation that we wish to employ in helping them to understand how cells develop and how those cells navigate in three-dimensional spac
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Contact: Katherine Kostiuk
KostiukK@missouri.edu
573-882-3346
University of Missouri-Columbia
21-Jun-2007