Lab classes in a pandemic: Arts and Sciences courses make most of situation
Author
By Nick Erickson
November 16, 2020
For the Departments of Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, class sizes were reduced by at least 50 percent, more lab sections were offered, and students wore masks and physically distanced during labs and classes on campus. Students were still able to continue their research, learn, grow, and collaborate on their projects.
Audrey Eshun uses a micropipette to transfer a small amount of DNA containing solution into an Eppendorf tube. During this lab students were ligating a small gene fragment into a plasmid vector as part of Martin Engelke’s Biotechnology class.Teague Williamson, left, and Abdula Dar test Williamson’s stimulus response and what movements were needed to get his muscles to contract during their Animal Physiology class.Jack Fogarty, right, watches as Sophie Huff, left, plates bacteria to test antibiotic susceptibility and practice a commonly used clinical laboratory method called the Kirby Bauer test. Students were learning about how antibiotics work and how some bacteria are becoming resistant to commonly prescribed antibiotic medications as part of the Microbiology and Society class.Kevin Diaz collects crystals of a highly colored compound called tetraphenylporphyrin during Professor Shawn Hitchcock’s Chemistry lab.Professor Jun-Hyun Kim, right, provides Leebaan Elmi, center, and Connor Epstein, left, with the next steps for their lab about the determination of zinc content in hair by atomic spectroscopy. Analysis of hair can be used as a diagnostic aid for the pathological state of an organism.Matthew Huisman looks into a mirror to see the direction the light is coming from the image produced by a pin placed in front of the mirror for David Marx’s Physics 109 lab. By making precise measurements, students are able to confirm many of the properties of mirrors that they would otherwise just see in a textbook or described in lecture.George Rutherford, right, helps Zoryana Smozhanyk, center, and Jordan Bryan troubleshoot issues programming their iOLAB’s for Advanced Experimental Physics.Mario Najdovski disrupts an unknown bacterial cell to extract the genomic DNA as part of a Microbiology lab lead by Ph.D. student Sadia Sultana.
