THE second Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, which recognizes significant and sustained impact on genetics education, is awarded to Sarah C. R. Elgin, the Viktor Hamburger Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Sally is an indefatigable leader and innovator in science education for students of all levels. No one is more worthy of this award.

A lifelong scientist, Sally knows that the best way to learn science is by doing science. In the early 1990s she partnered with teachers and administrators of the schools in her St. Louis community, University City, to help implement a novel “hands-on” science curriculum for grades K–8 and to bring hands-on DNA science to the high school genetics curriculum. These efforts transformed the science experience for many students. She and her colleagues obtained a grant from the National Institutes of Health to work with high school teachers. The effort was so successful that in 1994 the school district administrators were inspired to fund construction of new science laboratories dedicated to hands-on investigation for each grade school! With the help of many teachers and parents, Sally had quickly brought to reality her vision of learning science by doing science.

That first effort blossomed into many others—so many that it is difficult to keep track of them (even for this author, who had a close view of the proceedings). Sally's efforts led to the establishment of Washington University's Science Outreach Office (http://www.so.wustl.edu/), which serves schools throughout the St. Louis area. To say that the program has flourished is an understatement. It has attracted numerous grants to support its innovative programs, and its mission is now carried out by an outstanding full-time Director, Vicki May (recruited and mentored by Sally), and her dedicated 14-member staff. The team supports K–12 teachers in many ways, including providing materials and equipment for laboratory classes, facilitating partnerships between teachers and university faculty, driving curriculum development, enriching teachers by providing graduate level science education courses in partnership with the University's Department of Education, and engaging interested teachers and students in laboratory research experiences.

The Science Outreach Office has a remarkable reach, serving over 20,000 students and 1500 teachers each year. Since 1991, the Modern Genetics for All Students curriculum that Sally helped develop has been taught to 39,000 high school students through hands-on investigations. The program currently provides lab materials for about 80 St. Louis area teachers working with 4000 students. During the academic year, the Outreach Office offers courses for which elementary and middle-grade teachers earn graduate education credit while acquiring hands-on science teaching skills. Among these are the “Heredity and Life Cycles” course developed by Sally, which teaches Mendelian and molecular genetics. All of that (and more) grew from the hands-on learning flame that Sally lit more than 20 years ago, which she continues to fan.

Sally's innovative education efforts extend into the undergraduate classroom. Like most professors on an undergraduate campus, she has taught her share of courses, but she has gone farther than most faculty to develop truly innovative curricula. In recognition of her innovation in education, she was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professorship in 2002. She used the $1 million it provided to develop a unique course, “Research Explorations in Genomics,” that couples the expertise of Washington University's world-renowned Genome Center with the enthusiasm and interest of undergraduates for the field of genomics. The course harnesses the capabilities of the Genome Center to provide students the opportunity to participate in the production and assembly of high-quality DNA sequence data and offers them the challenge of analyzing large amounts of real, meaningful, novel data. The course has engaged over 40 upperclassmen in sequencing and annotation of the sequences of portions of several Drosophila genomes, a significant hands-on science experience to be sure.

Encouraged by the enthusiasm of the students, Sally is now sharing this course with faculty at other colleges and universities through the Genomics Education Partnership (http://gep.wustl.edu/) that she founded and leads. This nationwide effort, involving over 40 dedicated faculty, has provided students in primarily undergraduate institutions opportunities to participate in real and original genomics research. The students produce high-quality finished DNA sequences from the raw sequence reads, and they proceed to annotate the sequence. In the process, the young researchers identify interesting and important questions for further analysis. This new program has already resulted in a publication in a peer-reviewed journal with 13 undergraduate authors¹.

Sally's dedication to science education knows no bounds. She works tirelessly to engage students in independent research. Over the past 30 years, she and her students and postdocs have mentored over 60 undergraduate students in her own lab at Washington University. She set up a program to identify especially interested and talented students admitted to Washington University and place them in labs the summer before they matriculate. And she championed the Office of Undergraduate Research at Washington University, which has arranged research experiences for hundreds of undergraduate students. Sally's passion for engaging undergraduates in research led her and her husband Robert to endow the Elgin Fund for Summer Student Research at their alma mater, Pomona College (Sally, 1967; Robert, 1966). And she has promoted education as an inquiry-based activity by serving for 3 years as a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Cell Biology Education (now CBE-Life Sciences Education.).

Sally achieved all of this (and more) while making front-line contributions to knowledge of chromatin structure and function. She has pursued that interest since her days at Cal Tech as a graduate student with James Bonner and a postdoctoral fellow with Lee Hood. She quickly rose to the top of her field as a faculty member at Harvard and Washington University, and she has remained there for over 30 years. Her contributions to the field are too numerous to list in this short essay. Her current work focuses on heterochromatin structure and gene silencing, including her studies of the heterochromatin-binding protein HP1, discovered in her lab. Her analysis of the small fourth chromosome of Drosophila indicates that both the type and the density of repetitious sequences are critical for establishing and maintaining heterochromatic domains of chromosomes.

Sally Elgin is the consummate scientist/educator. Some scientists see a dichotomy in those two activities; Sally unites them. When she attends a research conference or presents an invited seminar, she usually brings a poster or a slide presentation highlighting her education initiatives. While the latter may draw a smaller audience than her research presentation, to Sally they are of equal importance.

Sally has been able to accomplish so much because she is a leader: she is remarkably successful in recruiting others to the cause, not by cajoling them, but by engaging their genuine interest and investment in these efforts. She leads by example, inspiring others to join the crusade to stimulate students' interest in science. At Washington University she has attracted many faculty members to this cause; the returns to the college and community have been great. Her colleagues owe her a great debt for offering opportunities to meet their teaching mission in meaningful, effective, and ultimately satisfying ways; many of her students are repaying that debt by following in Sally's footsteps and becoming scientists themselves. The world is a better place because of her efforts. No one is more worthy of the Genetics Society of America's Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education than Sarah C. R. Elgin.

Sarah C. R. Elgin

• Copyright © 2009 by the Genetics Society of America