<p>Howard Hughes honors Molecular Biophysics Professor. Professor of Chem, Alana Schepartz won the same honor in 2002. Money goes to teaching and developing new science curricular for undergrads</p>
<p>New Haven, Conn. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has named Scott Strobel, professor and newly appointed chair of the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale as one of its new HHMI Professors chosen for their extraordinary teaching, inspiration and mentoring of the next generation of science students.</p>
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<p>Strobel will receive $1 million over four years from HHMI to implement a program of innovative science teaching ideas as an HHMI Professor. HHMI will provide the resources for Strobel, a biophysicist and biochemist, to take undergraduates bio-prospecting for promising natural products in the world's rain forests. The students will then purify and analyze the compounds they collected and test them for potentially beneficial activity.</p>
<p>Strobels program will be an introductory science course for scientifically minded students, providing an engaging, hands-on learning experience that challenges students to think like working scientists and to have a personal stake in the outcome of their project...</p>
<p>The course Strobel proposed will have three parts. A spring semester course will lay groundwork in the science and technologies evolution, ecology, and molecular and structural analysis. Spring break will be a working trek to a rain forest the Amazon and New Zealand among the possible locations to collect local branches and twigs with their associated microbes.</p>
<p>Upon return students will spend a rigorous summer session classifying their finds true unknowns and will begin to identify new bioactive compounds. The program is designed to have students face the questions and issues of handling specimens, and designing and using the procedures to characterize them. There will be no pre-packaged laboratory; rather there will be elbow-to-elbow investigation with faculty.</p>