Personalized teaching and close mentoring relationships between faculty and students are at the heart of a Middlebury education. To ensure small classes, excellent advising, and meaningful mentoring, the College intends to add 25 new faculty positions, create professorships to honor exceptional faculty achievement, provide additional funds for curriculum development, and support collaborative research by professors and students.
“I knew I wanted to be part of a research project, but I didn’t
know I’d be involved to this extent. That’s the unique
thing about going to a school like Midd, where there are no grad students:
the undergrads become the hands of the research.”
— Dekker Deacon
“I have never seen the quality of undergraduate work anywhere else that
comes out of our students here. These kids are literally only limited
by the resources they’re given. The desire is there; the mentorship
is there; we just need funding for the research.”
— Assistant Professor Jeremy Ward
Hometown:
Goleta, California
Major: Molecular biology and biochemistry
Mentor: Jeremy Ward, assistant professor of biology, research team leader
“It’s a very close interaction. We’re always bouncing ideas off each other. Jeremy allows you to explore on your own, but he’s always there for support.”
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, by Matt Ridley. New research since this book’s publication in 2000 has reshaped the field, “but this book is still fascinating,” says Dekker Deacon ’07.
Nature via Nurture, by Matt Ridley. “The author’s newest book vividly explores how biology and upbringing interact with one another. [Professor] Jeremy [Ward] uses this book in his Human Genetics course. ”
Mapping Human History, by Steve Olson. “Another book used in the Human Genetics course, Mapping Human History delves into the interaction of genes, race, and culture.”
Dekker Deacon and Jeremy Ward both came to Middlebury in 2003. Dekker was a freshman from California with an interest in molecular biology, and Ward was a new assistant professor of biology with a research specialty in mammalian genetics. “My first class here was with Jeremy, and it was his first class at Midd, too. It was Introduction to Biology: Genetics and Evolution. I thought he was a great teacher, and I learned about his research from his class and from talking to him,” Dekker recalls.
Facts
about Infertility
- About 12 percent of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a baby to term. About 9.3 million American women use infertility services each year.
- About one-third or more infertility cases are traceable to the female partner, one-third or more to the male, and one-third or less to a combination, or to unknown factors.
- Treatments for infertility ranges from education and counseling to medications to sophisticated procedures such as in vitro fertilization.
Dekker took a second class with Ward and then, thinking he might be interested in a career in research, he started helping out in the lab as a technician. Ward has been studying a mutant gene in mice that appears to cause infertility by interfering with the process of meiosis. (That is the kind of cell division that produces germ cells: eggs and sperm.) A report on this research was published last spring by a team including scientists at Middlebury, Cornell, and Maine’s Jackson Laboratory. Dekker is one of the authors.
“The
implications of this research are pretty broad,” Ward says. “About
15 percent of human couples can’t conceive a child after a year
of trying.” In addition, errors in meiosis during reproduction
can lead to birth defects, spontaneous abortion, or infertility. And
mutations in some of the genes that are essential for meiosis have
been shown to contribute to cancer.”
“One
of the most exciting things about doing research like this is discovering
something truly new,” says Dekker, who is now doing stem cell
research with a team of scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital
and plans to become a doctor. “The end result is a genuine contribution
to human knowledge.”
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