The College of Sciences and College of Engineering are pleased to announce the appointment of Joseph Montoya, professor in the School of Biological Sciences, to the position of director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Ocean Science and Engineering (OSE) at Georgia Tech. The appointment follows a search process and approval by Georgia Tech leadership.
Montoya has previously served as associate chair for Undergraduate Affairs in the School of Biology (Biological Sciences), and has additional leadership experience with the ECOGIG (Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf) Consortium. He is also a founding member of the Georgia Tech Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, as well as a member of the College of Sciences Faculty Diversity Council.
“The OSE program benefits from a close collaboration between the Schools of Biological Sciences, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Civil and Environmental Engineering,” said David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences and professor in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry. “The College of Sciences and College of Engineering continue to support the program and Professor Montoya is well-prepared to advance the program.”
“At the same time, I would also like to express immense gratitude to Professor Emanuele Di Lorenzo for his vision, hard work and leadership in creating the OSE program and serving as its founding director,” Collard added. “He leaves the program in a healthy position, and with great opportunities to expand the instructional and research missions of Georgia Tech in a critical field of study.”
Meet Joseph Montoya
Joseph Montoya is a biological oceanographer with research interests at the interface of biology and geochemistry. His lab specializes in studies of the marine nitrogen cycle, using a combination of direct rate measurements and stable isotope natural abundance methods to explore the role of biological dinitrogen (N2) fixation in structuring the flow of nitrogen and energy through planktonic ecosystems. The metabolic capability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support biological production plays a key role in supporting diverse ecosystems in many offshore and coastal waters.
The Montoya Lab has also been deeply involved in studies of the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on offshore ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico. His group’s research program is highly interdisciplinary, incorporating work in plankton biology, marine chemistry, and isotope biogeochemistry both at sea and in the lab.
Montoya received an A.B. in Biology at the University of California and a Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. He served on the faculty of the Departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998.
Learn more about Montoya’s work:
- Scientists Discover the Biggest Seaweed Bloom in the World
- Gulf of Mexico Study Finds Microbes Thriving above Natural Oil Seeps
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
The second class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Graduate Fellows has been selected. The BBISS Graduate Fellows Program provides graduate students with enhanced training in sustainability, team science, and leadership in addition to their usual programs of study. Each two-year fellowship is funded by a generous gift from Brook and Shawn Byers and is additionally guided by a Faculty Advisory Board. The students apply their skills and talents, working directly with their peers, faculty, and external partners on long-term, large team, sustainability relevant projects. They are also afforded opportunities to organize and host seminar series, develop their professional networks, publish papers and draft proposals, and develop additional skills critical to their professional success and future careers leading research teams.
The 2022 class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Graduate Fellows are:
- Oliver Chapman - Ph.D. student, School of Public Policy, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
- Meaghan Conville - Ph.D. student, School of City and Regional Planning, College of Design
- Carlos Fernandez - Ph.D. student, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
- Sarah Roney - Ph.D. student, School of Biological Sciences
- Olianike Olaomo - Ph.D. student, School of History and Sociology, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
- Vishal Sharma - Ph.D. student, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing
The Faculty Advisory Board for the BBISS Graduate Fellows is composed of the faculty who submitted the students' nominations. Nominations for Class III of the BBISS Graduate Fellows program will open in the Spring 2023. It is expected that 6 to 8 scholars will be selected for next year’s group.
The Faculty Advisory Board for the inaugural class are:
Updates and outcomes will be posted to the BBISS website as the project progresses. Additional information is available at https://research.gatech.edu/sustainability/grad-fellows-program.
The second class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Graduate Fellows has been selected. The BBISS Graduate Fellows Program provides graduate students with enhanced training in sustainability, team science, and leadership in addition to their usual programs of study. Each two-year fellowship is funded by a generous gift from Brook and Shawn Byers and is additionally guided by a Faculty Advisory Board. The students apply their skills and talents, working directly with their peers, faculty, and external partners on long-term, large team, sustainability relevant projects. They are also afforded opportunities to organize and host seminar series, develop their professional networks, publish papers and draft proposals, and develop additional skills critical to their professional success and future careers leading research teams.
The 2022 class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Graduate Fellows are:
- Oliver Chapman - Ph.D. student, School of Public Policy, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
- Meaghan Conville - Ph.D. student, School of City and Regional Planning, College of Design
- Carlos Fernandez - Ph.D. student, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
- Sarah Roney - Ph.D. student, School of Biological Sciences
- Olianike Olaomo - Ph.D. student, School of History and Sociology, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
- Vishal Sharma - Ph.D. student, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing
The Faculty Advisory Board for the BBISS Graduate Fellows is composed of the faculty who submitted the students' nominations. Nominations for Class III of the BBISS Graduate Fellows program will open in the Spring 2023. It is expected that 6 to 8 scholars will be selected for next year’s group.
The Faculty Advisory Board for the inaugural class are:
Updates and outcomes will be posted to the BBISS website as the project progresses. Additional information is available at https://research.gatech.edu/sustainability/grad-fellows-program.
About half of the cancer patients who receive chemotherapy are treated with drugs made from platinum-based compounds, or PBCs. That’s because these drugs have demonstrated real success in improving cancer survival rates.
However, there’s a downside – off-target side effects, neurotoxicity being among the more prevalent and significant. Pain, fatigue, weakness, strange sensations, and difficulty with balance are the common symptoms known collectively as chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, or CIN. For many clinicians, this has been a fair trade-off – powerful, toxic cancer drugs save lives, but kill neurons. It’s the price of survival.
Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher Stephen Housley isn’t buying it.
“The basic position has been, ‘we cured your cancer, but you have neurotoxin damage, so let’s manage those symptoms.’ Because when neurons becomes dysfunctional, it is challenging to correct it,” said Housley, a neuroscientist, physiologist, and licensed physical therapist who works with Tim Cope, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and with cancer researcher John McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.
But what if the nerve cells didn’t have to become dysfunctional? What if you could stop the damage before it even begins? Housley and his colleagues aim to find out with help from a new NIH National Cancer Institute R01 grant, “which will help us really drill down into some of the mechanisms of neurotoxicity experienced by cancer survivors globally,” said Housley, who is leading the research effort.
Cope, principal investigator on the $2.5 million grant, added, “building on our recent discoveries, we’re taking a new direction that has the promising potential to identify novel targets for treating neurotoxic damage to the neurons that are responsible for movement disorders.”
The grant will support a growing area of research for Cope’s team, which published a paper on its discoveries earlier this year. Housley was the lead author of “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment”, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Cope and Housley work in the pre-clinical phase of cancer treatment, developing and studying animal models to mimic the human condition, so they can study the effects of chemotherapy on the individual neurons and circuits that human behaviors and perceptions emerge from. Previous studies from other labs have determined that these drugs are causing the nerve damage by themselves, but the Georgia Tech team discovered a more nuanced set of circumstances.
“Biology is more complex than that – the cancer interacts with the chemotherapy, changing the underlying causes and worsening the nerve dysfunction long-term,” Housley asserted, explaining that the majority of previous studies have focused only on the effects due to chemotherapy.
“If you are diagnosed with cancer and are treated with these drugs, in the great scenario, you go into remission and stop the drugs," he added. "The problem is, the side effects don’t stop. They actually evolve and convert into something a bit different than what was happening early on. And they persist for a long time, in many cases over a decade.”
Damage from the Start
Housley and Cope have focused on the chronic phase of cancer and discovered that there is a likely a link between what happens in the earliest stages of treatment and the long-term probability of developing neurologic disorders.
“While a patient is in the chair getting chemotherapy, they will not only have sensory problems, but an increased stimulation, often perceived as being painful or hypersensitivity to cold,” Housley said. “And you will see people with muscle spasms, and twitching, really visceral responses. The speed at which these drugs can impact the nervous system is stark. The motor system that helps us move is being affected in the course of minutes or hours.”
This muscle hyperactivity is due to an increase in the excitability of the nervous system across both the sensory and motor systems, and that spiking behavior – the currency of the nervous system– can last for days after the treatment. And then, the nervous system goes haywire.
In response to the infusion of these PBC drugs, the system overcompensates. The hyper excitability goes in an opposite direction. So now, instead of an electrical jolt, the system slows down: when reaching for and grabbing a cup of coffee, the collaboration between your motor and sensory systems gets fuzzy. Is your sensory system correctly anticipating the weight of the cup while your motor system grabs and lifts? Will the cup slip and spill hot coffee on your lap?
Housley, Cope and their multidisciplinary team, including McDonald, want to stop the initial hyper excitability from happening in the first place. Through a process called in vivo electrophysiology, they use glass electrodes to study the behavior of single cells as they respond to stimulation, such as that caused by the reaction of cancer to a platinum-based drug. With these approaches they are testing new pharmacologic and gene therapy approaches to prevent hyper excitability.
“It’s a challenging but powerful approach,” said Housley. The ultimate goal is to block the neurotoxic effects of the drugs, so that they can beat the cancer and not harm the patient’s long term health and quality of life. “Through these experiments, we want to knock out the various drivers of what we suspect is causing this serious problem, and ultimately prevent the long-term consequences of these neurological disorders.”
About half of the cancer patients who receive chemotherapy are treated with drugs made from platinum-based compounds, or PBCs. That’s because these drugs have demonstrated real success in improving cancer survival rates.
However, there’s a downside – off-target side effects, neurotoxicity being among the more prevalent and significant. Pain, fatigue, weakness, strange sensations, and difficulty with balance are the common symptoms known collectively as chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, or CIN. For many clinicians, this has been a fair trade-off – powerful, toxic cancer drugs save lives, but kill neurons. It’s the price of survival.
Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher Stephen Housley isn’t buying it.
“The basic position has been, ‘we cured your cancer, but you have neurotoxin damage, so let’s manage those symptoms.’ Because when neurons becomes dysfunctional, it is challenging to correct it,” said Housley, a neuroscientist, physiologist, and licensed physical therapist who works with Tim Cope, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and with cancer researcher John McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.
But what if the nerve cells didn’t have to become dysfunctional? What if you could stop the damage before it even begins? Housley and his colleagues aim to find out with help from a new NIH National Cancer Institute R01 grant, “which will help us really drill down into some of the mechanisms of neurotoxicity experienced by cancer survivors globally,” said Housley, who is leading the research effort.
Cope, principal investigator on the $2.5 million grant, added, “building on our recent discoveries, we’re taking a new direction that has the promising potential to identify novel targets for treating neurotoxic damage to the neurons that are responsible for movement disorders.”
The grant will support a growing area of research for Cope’s team, which published a paper on its discoveries earlier this year. Housley was the lead author of “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment”, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Cope and Housley work in the pre-clinical phase of cancer treatment, developing and studying animal models to mimic the human condition, so they can study the effects of chemotherapy on the individual neurons and circuits that human behaviors and perceptions emerge from. Previous studies from other labs have determined that these drugs are causing the nerve damage by themselves, but the Georgia Tech team discovered a more nuanced set of circumstances.
“Biology is more complex than that – the cancer interacts with the chemotherapy, changing the underlying causes and worsening the nerve dysfunction long-term,” Housley asserted, explaining that the majority of previous studies have focused only on the effects due to chemotherapy.
“If you are diagnosed with cancer and are treated with these drugs, in the great scenario, you go into remission and stop the drugs," he added. "The problem is, the side effects don’t stop. They actually evolve and convert into something a bit different than what was happening early on. And they persist for a long time, in many cases over a decade.”
Damage from the Start
Housley and Cope have focused on the chronic phase of cancer and discovered that there is a likely a link between what happens in the earliest stages of treatment and the long-term probability of developing neurologic disorders.
“While a patient is in the chair getting chemotherapy, they will not only have sensory problems, but an increased stimulation, often perceived as being painful or hypersensitivity to cold,” Housley said. “And you will see people with muscle spasms, and twitching, really visceral responses. The speed at which these drugs can impact the nervous system is stark. The motor system that helps us move is being affected in the course of minutes or hours.”
This muscle hyperactivity is due to an increase in the excitability of the nervous system across both the sensory and motor systems, and that spiking behavior – the currency of the nervous system– can last for days after the treatment. And then, the nervous system goes haywire.
In response to the infusion of these PBC drugs, the system overcompensates. The hyper excitability goes in an opposite direction. So now, instead of an electrical jolt, the system slows down: when reaching for and grabbing a cup of coffee, the collaboration between your motor and sensory systems gets fuzzy. Is your sensory system correctly anticipating the weight of the cup while your motor system grabs and lifts? Will the cup slip and spill hot coffee on your lap?
Housley, Cope and their multidisciplinary team, including McDonald, want to stop the initial hyper excitability from happening in the first place. Through a process called in vivo electrophysiology, they use glass electrodes to study the behavior of single cells as they respond to stimulation, such as that caused by the reaction of cancer to a platinum-based drug. With these approaches they are testing new pharmacologic and gene therapy approaches to prevent hyper excitability.
“It’s a challenging but powerful approach,” said Housley. The ultimate goal is to block the neurotoxic effects of the drugs, so that they can beat the cancer and not harm the patient’s long term health and quality of life. “Through these experiments, we want to knock out the various drivers of what we suspect is causing this serious problem, and ultimately prevent the long-term consequences of these neurological disorders.”
Since 2017, the annual Quantitative Biosciences Hands-On Modeling Workshop has aimed to introduce students and faculty of all skill levels and backgrounds to the use of computational modeling in studying biological systems. For the past two years, these workshops have been held virtually, reaching over 150 attendees from around the world with the apt theme of modeling epidemics.
This summer, organizers welcomed 45 attendees for an in-person workshop for the first time since 2019.
“While virtual workshops have some benefits — for example being able to reach a larger audience — being in-person is so much more conducive to forming connections with people,” shared J.C. Gumbart, associate professor in the School of Physics and associate director of the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech. “One of my favorite parts of workshops is just sitting and chatting with participants one-on-one about their research background and interests, something that’s very hard to do over Zoom.”
Organized by the first-year Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) and the NIH T32 Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) cohorts, this year’s two-day workshop highlighted how computational modeling can be applied to better understand gene expression. As no prior modeling or even programming experience was necessary to attend, the in-person workshop was open to graduate students, scientists, and faculty members from any field of research.
The workshop opened with a lecture on the event’s theme, stochastic gene expression, delivered by Adriana Lucia-Sanz, postdoctoral researcher in the Weitz Group at Georgia Tech, which is led by Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair of Biological Sciences and founding director of the Quantitative Biosciences program. The attendees then broke into smaller groups led by organizers to work through hands-on modeling tutorials in various programming languages.
“The thing that I enjoyed the most was the group cultures that formed among the workshop groups,” shared Chris Zhang, a first-year Ph.D. student in Quantitative Biosciences and one of the workshop’s organizers. “I was incredibly happy at the quantity and quality of new relationships and connections that were made during this workshop.”
For first-year student Siya Xie, “the best memory was definitely the experience of our first-year cohort working together.”
The event closed with a plenary lecture on how randomness affects the biology and behavior of living cells by Ido Golding, professor of biological physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The annual gathering “has been quite revealing,” shared Hameed Sanusi, an attendee and Georgia State University bioinformatics graduate student. “I was glad to be part of this workshop — and more glad to have worked with budding scientists and professionals from the Atlanta area.”
“Hopefully,” added Zhang, “the participants learned a lot about how to think about biology from a quantitative perspective.”
Since 2017, the annual Quantitative Biosciences Hands-On Modeling Workshop has aimed to introduce students and faculty of all skill levels and backgrounds to the use of computational modeling in studying biological systems. For the past two years, these workshops have been held virtually, reaching over 150 attendees from around the world with the apt theme of modeling epidemics.
This summer, organizers welcomed 45 attendees for an in-person workshop for the first time since 2019.
“While virtual workshops have some benefits — for example being able to reach a larger audience — being in-person is so much more conducive to forming connections with people,” shared J.C. Gumbart, associate professor in the School of Physics and associate director of the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech. “One of my favorite parts of workshops is just sitting and chatting with participants one-on-one about their research background and interests, something that’s very hard to do over Zoom.”
Organized by the first-year Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) and the NIH T32 Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) cohorts, this year’s two-day workshop highlighted how computational modeling can be applied to better understand gene expression. As no prior modeling or even programming experience was necessary to attend, the in-person workshop was open to graduate students, scientists, and faculty members from any field of research.
The workshop opened with a lecture on the event’s theme, stochastic gene expression, delivered by Adriana Lucia-Sanz, postdoctoral researcher in the Weitz Group at Georgia Tech, which is led by Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair of Biological Sciences and founding director of the Quantitative Biosciences program. The attendees then broke into smaller groups led by organizers to work through hands-on modeling tutorials in various programming languages.
“The thing that I enjoyed the most was the group cultures that formed among the workshop groups,” shared Chris Zhang, a first-year Ph.D. student in Quantitative Biosciences and one of the workshop’s organizers. “I was incredibly happy at the quantity and quality of new relationships and connections that were made during this workshop.”
For first-year student Siya Xie, “the best memory was definitely the experience of our first-year cohort working together.”
The event closed with a plenary lecture on how randomness affects the biology and behavior of living cells by Ido Golding, professor of biological physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The annual gathering “has been quite revealing,” shared Hameed Sanusi, an attendee and Georgia State University bioinformatics graduate student. “I was glad to be part of this workshop — and more glad to have worked with budding scientists and professionals from the Atlanta area.”
“Hopefully,” added Zhang, “the participants learned a lot about how to think about biology from a quantitative perspective.”
Dr. Andrew Rassweiler is a marine ecologist who combines field experiments, data analysis and mathematical modeling to address both basic and applied questions, mainly in temperate reef ecosystems. He has used this mix of tools to understand community dynamics, particularly the mechanisms that lead to abrupt shifts from one species assemblage to another. Currently, his main focus is on synthesizing and analyzing long-term monitoring data from the National Park Service’s Kelp Forest Monitoring Program, the U.S. Geological Survey’s San Nicolas Island baseline monitoring and the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER’s kelp forest community monitoring. Dr. Rassweiler also works on fishery management and Marine Conservation questions, using spatially explicit models to explore optimal fisheries management strategies and tradeoffs between achieving fishery and conservation goals. His models have been used in practical contexts as well, most notably in guiding the placement of marine protected areas as part of California’s Marine Life Protection Act process. Although his expertise is in community ecology, to better understand the many abiotic factors influencing ecological dynamics, he works closely with oceanographers, geographers and economists.
Event Details
Three postdoctoral scientists have received National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships to support their research across the College of Sciences in celestial mechanics, microbial dynamics and infection, and host-microbe symbiosis.
Celestial mechanics
Bhanu Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow (NSTRF) in the School of Mathematics, has won a fellowship for work in dynamical systems applied to celestial mechanics and applied astrodynamics for space mission design. His Ph.D. is set to be conferred in August. Kumar received his M.S. from the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech last December, and is also an NSTRF visiting technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works with his mentor and research collaborator Rodney Anderson. Kumar’s adviser at Tech is Rafael de la Llave, professor in the School of Mathematics.
Microbial dynamics and infection
Elijah (Eli) Mehlferber is slated to receive his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley this summer, before beginning research in the lab of Sam Brown, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI) at Georgia Tech. Mehlferber received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Georgia. Mehlferber’s research seeks to understand how community dynamics in the microbiome can impact susceptibility to pathogen invasion.
“I was aware of CMDI through talking to Sam before deciding to apply for the fellowship in his lab, and it was definitely one of the factors that influenced my decision to join the program,” Mehlferber says. “I liked the idea of having a cross-disciplinary group of like-minded researchers to work and collaborate with — and a program that encourages that kind of work. I think a lot of my best research has taken place through these sorts of collaborations so I’m very excited to continue that with the folks across CMDI.”
Host-microbe symbiosis
Kayla Stoy is set to receive her Ph.D. this summer at Emory University before joining Mehlferber in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech this fall. Stoy will complete her NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship with research in the lab of William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program at Tech. Ratcliff’s lab focuses on experimental evolution of multicellular complexity. While at Emory, Stoy researched population biology, ecology, and evolution with a focus on mutualism.
In a recent email from a fellow University of Georgia institution, colleagues conducting a survey asked Tech for recommendations on the most common textbooks used for introductory biology courses.
The answer from Jung Choi, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Master’s program in Bioinformatics: “At Georgia Tech, we use our own,” with an invitation to check out the open source textbooks.
Choi and senior academic professionals Shana Kerr and Chrissy Spencer, who also serves as associate chair for Undergraduate Affairs in Biological Sciences, don’t just teach those introductory courses. They wrote the two textbooks for the classes “Biological Principles” and “Organismal Biology” specifically for their students, who also get to save money that would have been spent on commercial textbooks for those courses.
The textbooks are examples of open education resources (OER), which involves the use of digital learning and teaching materials that are either in the public domain, or are under copyrights that allow them to be used, changed, and shared at no cost.
“We have been using these in lieu of a commercial textbook for over five years now, with a high degree of both instructor and student satisfaction,” Choi says. “Students and teachers all over the country and from all over the world access our online textbook,” thanks to a license from Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that protects copyrights while enabling sharing of knowledge and creativity.
That license allows for “anyone to use the textbooks as is, or to copy and modify for their own purpose, for non-commercial use with attribution and making any modifications also available under the same license,” Choi says.
Both Spencer and Kerr credit Choi for moving the School of Biological Sciences toward OER. “To me, the story is about a student educator and faculty mentor (Jung Choi) whose ideas and passion for undergraduate student learning generated this online textbook as the end product,” says Spencer.
OER: Up-to-date, more accessible textbooks
Both OER textbooks are, as Spencer calls them, “living documents” that are regularly updated, not just with updated editions, but also to incorporate new scientific ideas.
“We built in readings on gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 (the genetic-editing technique that won its scientists a 2020 Nobel Prize) that are not yet in most commercial textbooks,” Spencer says. “During the pandemic we incorporated content on viruses and specifically on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.”
Along with Choi, Spencer, and Kerr, about a dozen faculty members have rotated through teaching the “Introductory Biology” sequence, Choi says. “All the faculty have readily accepted using the site,” for textbooks, he explains. “Some suggested improvements or pointed out corrections that we quickly incorporated on our pages. We also looked at student performance on midterm and final exam questions, and found no difference in student performance before and after the transition to our web pages.”
Kerr says she was excited to work with Choi and Spencer on a project that she believed “would benefit students — both academically and financially.”
Before OER, the introductory biology textbook and homework packet cost up to $250 per student. “We adopted a low-cost homework and in-class quizzing system that cost $12,” Choi says. “Estimating that about 500 students take the course each year, that's more than $100,000 per year (in savings) for this single course.”
When the transition to OER began, one class had access to both the faculty-written textbook and a commercial textbook. “We surveyed students to see which resources they used, and they overwhelmingly used our web pages over the alternatives,” Choi says.
From teachers to textbook authors
The idea to use OER resources was initially prompted by Choi’s recognition that students struggled to learn about membranes, molecules, and metabolism from an evolutionary perspective, Spencer says. “The textbooks we used did not integrate evolutionary thinking into that content, and in fact were very human-centered in their approach.”
Choi had already developed OER readings as blog posts for about a quarter of the “Biological Principles” course in 2012 when the decision was made to develop the School’s own textbook, with Choi, Kerr, and Spencer dividing the writing duties. “Personally, I felt like it was down to the wire to get everything in place, but our mutual commitment to serving our students was a strong motivator to keep at it,” Kerr says.
Chaohua Ou, assistant director of Special Projects and Educational Initiatives at Georgia Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), adds that OER is used in many ways across the Institute, explaining that it includes “many things, not just books. They could be materials for teaching, learning, and research in any format or medium that are publicly accessible.”
Ou says that Choi, Kerr, and Spencer were the second group of Georgia Tech faculty to receive an Affordable Learning Georgia grant in 2015 to fund the textbook initiative, with the first group led by Industrial Design faculty. Affordable Learning Georgia is an organization dedicated to reducing education costs by endorsing the use of OER in Georgia schools.
Crafting a Georgia Tech-specific textbook
Choi, Kerr, Spencer, and other faculty who instruct in the introductory biology courses at Georgia Tech spent a semester crafting very specific learning objectives for every class session of the “Biological Principles” course. “These objectives are designed to let students know precisely what we expect them to know and be able to do by the end of the class session,” Kerr says. “Without the learning objectives, I don’t think we could have written the textbook in such a targeted and streamlined way.”
“Writing this book was focused, fast, and furious,” Spencer says. “I was so excited to be implementing a free textbook resource that was truly focused on only the content and applications that we wanted the students to know for the course. When writing to deadline, I felt more attuned to the course content, and more considerate of what students typically already knew and what they so often struggled with in the course.”
A textbook for the second introductory biology course, “Organismal Biology,” came about because the faculty decided it was not reasonable to require students to buy a full commercial textbook for just one semester of the two-semester course sequence.
“Our successful development and release of the ‘Biological Principles’ OER spurred me to take on a similar project for ‘Organismal Biology,’” Kerr says.
Choi says since OER has trended in higher education, commercial publishers have launched lower-cost options such as rentals or online subscriptions. Yet he says students lose access to those when their subscriptions or rentals expire. “Our web pages are accessible to students for as long as we continue to host the site.”
Faculty across Biological Sciences have been supportive of OER, Spencer adds, “after seeing the data that we’ve done ‘no harm’ to student learning — while saving them on textbook and online homework system costs.”
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