Interview with acting president Neil Kerwin

BY ADRIENNE FRANK

Most people look at Mouse Trap and see hours of fun with the 6- to 12-year-old set. Biology professor Victoria Connaughton looks at the children’s game and sees an innovative way to teach cellular respiration.

“I love thinking of creative ways to present the material,” says Connaughton, who’s in her seventh year at AU. “Science isn’t just sitting in your chair, taking notes, and memorizing facts. Science can also be so much fun.”

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Which brings us back to Mouse Trap.

The object of the game is to build an intricate trap with levers, catapults, and gears to capture the opposition’s mice. In Connaughton’s lab, nestled in the basement of Hurst Hall, the rules are a little different.

“Cellular respiration, how cells make energy, is a complicated process. Keeping all the steps organized can be difficult,” she explains. In Connaughton’s version of the game, each lever and pulley represents a step in cellular respiration. The goal is to put the steps together in the correct order and “make energy by catching a mouse.”

“It’s great because the complexity of the biological process is mimicked in the game,” she said. “The students can see that one step leads to another. They get it.”

And the board game is just one of the many tricks up the sleeve of Connaughton’s white lab coat.

She uses jump ropes for the unit on muscles and simulates an archeological dig to get students excited about the skeletal system.

“Bones are really important, but they’re also really boring,” said Connaughton. To spice things up, she has her students “excavate” bones from a box of sand, label and assemble the skeleton and determine what animal it came from.

“When I was a biology major, things were much different,” said Connaughton, who earned her BA in biology from Bucknell University and her PhD in marine studies from the University of Delaware. “Everything was lecture based; you took notes, and then you were tested.

“When I first came to AU, that was my teaching style, because that’s all I knew,” she continued. “Granted, some material just has to be presented that way, but I could sense I wasn’t engaging students as much as I thought I could. I wanted them to get involved in what we were talking about, so I started looking at the material from other perspectives.”

Cathy Schaeff, biology department chair, describes Connaughton as energetic and creative and says “she reflects the culture and quality of our department.”

“I am very lucky to be able to lead a faculty who are so engaged and enthusiastic,” said Schaeff. “And it’s not just the faculty. The students also reflect this level of excitement and dedication to their studies and their AU experience.” Last spring, for example, the graduate students organized a hike in Great Falls for faculty and students, which almost all of the faculty attended. The hike has become a semester tradition, according to Schaeff.

A mother of two, Connaughton said she feels fortunate to work with faculty who share her passion for working with students.

“We’re a very young faculty, but we’re a very strong, creative faculty. All of us are active researchers and love working alongside students.”

As a teacher, you have to like what you’re doing and it has to show,” Connaughton continued. “In our department, it’s obvious we all love what we’re doing.”