Brown Teaching Grants support innovative undergrad teaching

Innovative undergraduate teaching is once again getting a boost from the Brown Teaching Grants Program at Rice University. Ten proposals submitted to Rice’s Committee on Teaching this year were selected to receive funding, which comes from a grant from Houston’s Brown Foundation Inc.

The proposals that the committee chose for funding were selected based on innovation, worthiness and the number of students that would be affected.

“We were excited this spring to have the assistance of the recently established Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence in promoting these newly funded Brown Teaching Grants,” said Michael Gustin, professor of biochemistry and cell biology and chair of the Committee on Teaching.

Below are the winning proposals for 2014-15 with their faculty sponsors and academic departments.

“Saltwater Not Included: SCALE-UP Tools for Teaching Coral Reef Ecology”
Adrienne Simoes Correa, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

“Unmasking the Biological Side of Racial Identity: Genetic Testing for Racial Ancestry”
Jenifer Bratter, Sociology

“BIOE 421: Microcontroller Applications”
Jordan Miller, Bioengineering

“The Chemistry of Cooking: Making Science More Palatable through Food and Cuisine”
Lesa Tran, Chemistry

“Bioinstrumentation”
Renata Ramos, Bioengineering

“Innovation Lab for Mobile Health”
Ashutosh Sabharwal and Ashok Veeraraghavan, Electrical and Computer Engineering

“3-D Models of Canonical Solid Structures for Inorganic Chemistry Education”
Angel Martí, Chemistry

“Installation of Lab Frames in the Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Laboratory”
Paul Engel, Chemistry

“EMS Education Program Enhancements”
Lisa Basgall, Rice Emergency Medical Services

“Journal As Art: A Place for the Visual in the 2014 Rice Review”
Ian Schimmel, English