The Consortium is pleased to announce the two faculty award winners for the 2010 Janet Andersen Lecture Award. Professors Sarah (Sally) Elgin from Washington University in St. Louis and Graham Peaslee from Hope College were nominated by faculty and student colleagues and were chosen from a very strong field of candidates from throughout the Consortium.  Each of them will present a lecture about their research at one of the fall Undergraduate Research Symposia hosted at Washington Unviersity in St. Louis and The University of Chicago.

2010 Janet Andersen Lecture Award in the Biological Sciences and Psychology

Professor Sarah (Sally) C.R. Elgin has been a dedicated teacher, scholar and mentor for students from elementary school through graduate school for more than 3 decades. Sally graduated from Pomona College and earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1971. She spent time as a postdoc at Caltech and as a faculty member at Harvard University before joining the faculty of the Biology Department at Washington University in 1981. In addition to her appointment in biology, Dr. Elgin holds appointments as Professor of Education in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biophysics and Professor of Genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine.  

Dr. Elgin was the director of Washington University’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)-funded Undergraduate Biological Sciences Education Program from 1992 – 2004. Accoring to the nomination letter writen by several of her colleagues, “We have maintained this funding and the cumulative effect of this has been profound on both curriculum and on student research.” In 2002, Sally was selected to be one of only 20 HHMI Professors and she used her million dollar grant to establish the Genomics Education Partnership (http://www.gep.wustl.edu/).  As part of this HHMI-supported work, “She developed an upper level lab in genomics, in which students perfrom bioinformatics analysis on different species of Drosophila to understand gene organization and expression control and evolution.The data the students generate during the course contributes to our understanding of chromosome organization and gene expression, and many of these students are co-authors on published work from the project.”

Sally has spent countless hours mentoring undergraduates conducting research projects both in and out of these courses. According to one of these undergraduates “I began the semester with limited knowledge of the bioinformatics tools available for analyzing genomes. However, with Dr. Elgin’s mentoring, I gained a strong understanding of the work associated with assembling genome squences and annotation. By the end of the semester, I felt confident using numerous bioinformatics tools to carefully and appropriately annotate my portion of the D.grimshawi fourth chromosome.”

At Wash U, Sally has demonstrated a nearly unparallelled commitment to providing authentic, rigorous and ongoing research opportunities for K-12 students and teachers, undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members. In the late 1980’s, she created the science education partnership with an area K-12 school district. This program eventually blossomed into the University’s Science Outreach Office (http://www.so.wustl.edu/index.html) which now serves more than 20,000 students and several thousand teachers each year.  

Among many professional accomplishments and awards, she earned the 2010 Career Achievement Award from Wash U’s Office of Undergraduate Research. According to her nomination letter, “Indeed, it is largely, if not exclusively due to Sally’s efforts that we have an Office of Undergraduate Research at the university. She lobbied for years with the administration to found this office to promote undergraduate research.”