WHAT DO WE TEACH ?

Health Sciences curricular program teaching

We have one of the largest teaching responsibilities in the basic science departments of the School of Medicine. A core of dedicated and beloved faculty teach anatomy (AKA Human Form and Function or HFF), histology, and neuroscience to undergraduates, medical and allied health professional students, and have leadership roles in curriculum development within the School of Medicine.

 

 

Graduate level courses and mentoring 

Members of the department regularly teach seminar style courses, and have enthusiastically joined the interdisciplinary programs at UW.  Many teach courses associated with the Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Computational Science, and the Biological Physics, Structure and Design interdisciplinary programs and various training grants.  Topics covered by such courses include drug design, molecular modeling, and signal transduction.  Training students to approach scientific questions in interdisciplinary ways is crucial for today’s graduate education, and the Department has chosen to recruit students into its laboratories from the talented group supported by these and other cross-discipline programs.  Once in the lab, trainees gain valuable knowledge and skills such as keeping a research notebook, immunostaining, tissue harvest, sectioning, animal care, genotyping and confocal microscopy, offering them a well-rounded laboratory experience that is hard to come by through traditional course work.

 

Teaching beyond the academy

Our faculty teach in settings that reach communities well beyond the UW, into the local and global community. We are honored to participate in community outreach programs serving diverse populations in the community, for example the Doc for a Day and Camp Neuro Programs, Grey Matters, UW Mini Medical School Program, and Brain Awareness Day.

Some faculty are featured in podcasts (e.g., see Tom Reh on retina development), and some teach in national and international summer schools, (e.g., David Raible teaches Zebrafish Development and Genetics at Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, and Anitha Pasupathy and Wyeth Bair are highly regarded teachers in the European Summer School in Visual Neuroscience (Rauischholzhausen, Germany). Some faculty host sites to widely disseminate important new findings and research tools (e.g., Sam Golden hosts the open source toolkit SIMBA for computer classification of complex social behaviors in experimental animals and Nick Steinmetz curates the Slack Channel and GitHub Wiki for Neuropixels). Our reach is truly global!