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SCOTT Hawley is the 2008 recipient of the Genetics Society of America's Award for Excellence in Education. This honor was established a year ago to recognize "individuals or groups that have had significant, sustained impact on genetics education at any level, ... have promoted greater exposure to and deeper understanding of genetics through distinguished teaching or mentoring, development of innovative pedagogical approaches or tools, design of new courses or curricula, national leadership, and/or public engagement and outreach." Scott is an excellent choice for this award, as he exemplifies not just one or a few, but all of these principles.
Scott began his first faculty appointment in 1982, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM), and it was there that he mentored his first graduate students. Scott's own graduate advisor, Larry Sandler, was renowned for his outstanding mentoring of his students. For the past 20 years, the Larry Sandler Award has been given annually to a person that has recently completed an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in Drosophila research. Scott's mentoring style successfully incorporates elements of Larry's approach and his own methods. Scott's success in mentoring students is evident: His former students now hold a variety of different positions, including positions in academic research and teaching, biotechnology research, and scientific publishing.
At AECOM, Scott's opportunities in the classroom were largely limited to teaching courses for graduate students in the biomedical sciences. Still, he distinguished himself in this area: A year after being promoted to Associate Professor, he was elected into the Davidow Society in recognition of his excellence in teaching.
Scott was able to expand his teaching significantly when he moved across the country in 1991 to become Professor of Genetics at the University of California at Davis. Being a public university with a large undergraduate student body, this position offered Scott the chance to expand his teaching to the undergraduate realm, which he did to great acclaim. He taught genetics at all levels, from a course for nonscience majors to an advanced course for graduate students. His passion for teaching is illustrated in a comment from a dean at UC-Davis, who once told me that Scott was the only faculty member he had ever met who actually volunteered to take on more than the standard teaching load.
Scott's classroom lectures, like his science seminars, are known for being engaging and being sprinkled with anecdotes and jokes. Once, while walking to class the day after returning from serving on a study section, Scott had to ask his teaching assistants what he was supposed to lecture on that day. One of them, who had been a TA for the course the previous year, said, "This is the lecture where you tell the joke about ... , " and proceeded to describe some particular joke. Scott's response was, "Oh, I know that lecture. I like giving that one." This rare ability—to be able to walk into a classroom without notes or review—is a testament to Scott's knowledge and to his comfort in the classroom.
Scott's courses at Davis were more than just informative and amusing—they were also innovative. In a course for nonscience majors, he taught transmission, chromosomal, and molecular genetics, all using human sex determination as a case study. Scott recognized both the inherent interest in this topic and the remarkable way in which all of the principles of genetics could be taught around this one topic. The success of this approach led Scott to coauthor his first book, The Human Genome: A User's Guide (HAWLEY and MORI 1998; RICHARDS and HAWLEY 2004). This book, now in its second edition, is uniquely versatile among genetics texts, in that it can be read by nonscientists as an introduction to modern genetics or used in the classroom as a textbook (it has been adopted as such by dozens of instructors). Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 1998, Scott has also coauthored a highly revised second edition and an upper-level text, Advanced Genetic Analysis: Finding Meaning in the Genome (HAWLEY and WALKER 2002).
Another innovation that Scott brought to his courses at Davis is the use of creative essays as a teaching tool. He and a former graduate student in his laboratory published an article describing the use of these essays for the Genetics Education section of GENETICS (KOEHLER and HAWLEY 1999). I highly recommend this article to anyone looking for ways to promote student engagement in their courses or to anyone just looking for a fun read: The first line of the text is classic Scott, and some of the excerpts from students' essays are priceless.
Scott also expanded his laboratory mentoring to undergraduate students at UC-Davis. The number of undergraduates doing research in his laboratory was often greater than the number of graduate students and postdocs combined; while I was a postdoctoral fellow in Scott's lab, I once counted 17 undergraduate researchers! It would be easy for many of us to find this number of undergraduates to take into our laboratories, but the results would be disastrous, both for the undergraduates and for the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the lab. Not only did Scott pull this feat off, but also the lab profited from it. Many of these undergraduates were productive. Perusing the list of publications from Scott's lab, I recognize among the coauthors the names of at least two dozen undergraduates whose time in the lab overlapped with mine. Many of these subsequently entered prestigious Ph.D., M.D., or M.D.–Ph.D. programs around the country.
I would not be writing this if only undergraduates had benefited from Scott's teaching at UC-Davis. He continued to mentor graduate students and an increased number of postdoctoral fellows. As one of the latter, I can personally attest to the benefits of having had Scott as a mentor. Scott allows his postdoctoral fellows great latitude in pursuing their research interests. At the same time, he can always be relied on to provide guidance (Scott has never had a shortage of ideas for interesting projects). When the time came for me to strike out on my own, Scott was helpful in assisting me through the process of applying and interviewing for positions, and he generously allowed me to continue to work on projects I had developed while in his laboratory, without worrying that I would be competing with him. Even after I left his lab, he continued to give me advice on setting up my lab, recruiting personnel, securing funding, and functioning within a department. Concerning the latter, I recall that one of Scott's nuggets of advice was that, with the exception of teaching, whenever I was assigned any department service, I should be sure to mangle it so badly that it would be more work when I was done than when I started; otherwise, they would just give me more things to do. This is clearly advice that Scott himself never followed—his departmental and institutional service has been as strong as his teaching.
Scott's history of distinguished classroom teaching and laboratory mentoring at all levels, along with the portfolio of genetics texts he has written or cowritten, covers most of the possible reasons a person may be selected to receive the Excellence in Education award. The final possible qualifications listed in the award description are "national leadership and/or public engagement and outreach." Scott's service in these two areas is similarly outstanding.
In terms of national leadership, Scott is a role model. He has been active in the GSA and is currently on the editorial boards of three journals. He has served on numerous grant review panels, including being a permanent member of American Cancer Society panels for 10 years and serving in an ad hoc capacity on nearly a dozen National Science Foundation panels and a similar number of study section meetings for the National Institutes of Health. Since 1994 he has been cochair, with Michael Ashburner, of the Advanced Drosophila Genetics course, which met first at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and subsequently in India and the United Kingdom. Scott has coauthored or coedited two crucial resources for Drosophila researchers: Drosophila Protocols (SULLIVAN et al. 1999) and Drosophila: A Laboratory Handbook (ASHBURNER et al. 2004). In 1992, Scott and Nancy Kleckner initiated the Gordon Research Conference on Meiosis, which quickly became, and continues to be, an extremely popular meeting.
With regard to public engagement and outreach, Scott gives his time generously to educate and engage with myriad community groups. He participates annually in training programs for science teachers in secondary education, and he has given invited talks to audiences as diverse as elementary and secondary school students, local chapters of the American Cancer Society, students and parents of the Gifted Association of Missouri, and attendees of a Klinefelter Syndrome Symposium.
In the above text, I have attempted to give a short outline of how Scott's teaching went from being strong in his first appointment at AECOM to flourishing in his next position at UC-Davis. In 2001, Scott left Davis to become an Investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. Some would view the move to a prestigious private research institution as an opportunity to establish a laboratory staffed with postdoctoral fellows, while retreating from other forms of teaching. Scott has indeed expanded his mentorship of postdoctoral fellows in his current position, but he has certainly not retreated from other forms of teaching. In addition to his primary appointment at the Stowers Institute, Scott is a professor or adjunct professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the University of Kansas at Edwards. He continues to teach an undergraduate genetics course each fall (as sole instructor) and spring (as one of two co-instructors), and he gives lectures in additional courses. He continues to recruit both graduate and undergraduate students to his laboratory. He continues to give talks to community and teacher groups. In short, Scott continues to be the epitome of the outstanding science educator for whom this award was devised. Congratulations, Scott!
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LITERATURE CITED
ASHBURNER, M., R. S. HAWLEY and K. GOLIC, 2004 Drosophila: A Laboratory Handbook, Ed. 2. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, New York.
HAWLEY, R. S., and C. MORI, 1998 The Human Genome: A User's Guide. Academic Press, San Diego.
HAWLEY, R. S., and M. WALKER, 2002 Advanced Genetic Analysis: Finding Meaning in the Genome. Blackwell, Boston.
KOEHLER, K. E., and R. S. HAWLEY, 1999 Tales from the front: the creative essay as a tool in the teaching of human genetics. Genetics 152: 1229–1240.
RICHARDS, J., and R. S. HAWLEY, 2004 The Human Genome: A User's Guide, Ed. 2. Academic Press, San Diego.
SULLIVAN, W. S., M. ASHBURNER and R. S. HAWLEY, 1999 Drosophila Protocols. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, New York.
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