The Yale initiative, led by Leonard Munstermann, senior research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health in the School of Medicine, will design science curricula, targeting middle school students, to create a better understanding of the dynamics and biology of how disease is transmitted.

Yale will receive five years of support from the SEPA grant -- a total of $1.3 million of the $9.4 million SEPA fund. It will be administered by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the NIH.

"The curricula we design will feature Lyme disease and West Nile encephalitis because of their public health significance, and because they point to broader biological relationships," said Munstermann. "Yale University is also a major research center for these diseases and will provide scientific authority for the curriculum content."

Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale will house the project, coordinated by museum educators Laura Fawcett and Terri Stern. The scientific component will draw on the relevant expertise from researchers at Yale School of Medicine.

In Phase I, investigators from the Yale School of Medicine and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station--together with the Peabody Museum educators--will work with a select group of 10 science teachers from three urban public school districts to design curricula based on their joint resources. The product will include inquiry-based lesson plans, a teacher reference manual and student science kits. Researchers, graduate s
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Contact: Janet Rettig Emanuel
janet.emanuel@yale.edu
203-432-2157
Yale University
2-Nov-2005