Gundula Bosch
Johns Hopkins University
The Biophysicist Editor
What are you currently working on that excites you?
As the director of the R3 Center for Innovation in Science Education at Johns Hopkins, I am passionate about global graduate science education reform. We emphasize critical, integrative thinking skills that enable students to do good research according to the “three Rs” of reliable science: Rigor, Reproducibility, and Responsibility. Those core norms of sound research practice inspired the name of our R3 science education programs that teach learners to think broadly, collaboratively, and in a less specialized manner, how to solve big, interdisciplinary problems. This allows students to practice scientific decision making based on evidence, logical reasoning, practical ethics, and effective communication.
At a cocktail party of non-scientists, how would you explain what you do?
Today’s students have the knowledge of the world on their cell phones, but we don’t teach them to put that knowledge into a bigger-picture context, integrate it, and communicate it, not only to peers and colleagues, but also to the public. I was originally trained in x-ray crystallography and structure-based drug design, yet not coming from an academic family background, I always had to explain to family and friends what I do using the things found on a breakfast table. Now, as a fulltime educational scholar in STEM and health science, I take advantage of those skills and would describe what we do in my team as “teaching science like we do science.” That term was originally coined by my dear colleague Linda Columbus for a session that we still teach at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. For the Johns Hopkins R3 Program, this implies that we get inspired by Peter Medawar’s philosophy of learning from mistakes: i.e., we teach our learners through sound error analysis where science can go wrong and how we can all work towards improvement. Thereby, it is important to look outside the rims of our petri dishes and apply what we learn in one field of research to another. Our heroes in science, such as Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, were educated like that and show us that broad thinking, everlasting curiosity, and education in the first principles of science can help us break out of our silos and make great discoveries.