Alberts to Direct New Program for Science Education Partnership

Not long after Bruce Alberts returned to work at UCSF after serving a productive 12-year term as president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), he resumed his efforts to improve science education locally. A longtime advocate of enhancing science teaching and learning, Alberts served from 1993 to 2005 as president of the NAS in Washington, DC. He took the job at the NAS because he saw it "as a way to have a major impact on science education at all levels." At UCSF, Alberts, PhD, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, helped found the Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP), a nearly 20-year collaboration of UCSF and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD.) Last week, UCSF learned that it has been awarded a $2.1 million grant by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to bolster its partnership with SFUSD. The award - the largest single grant to SEP -- will address four crucial challenges in the sciences by:

• • Increasing access to science and science careers for talented high school and undergraduate students from low-income families and backgrounds underrepresented in science;
• • Promoting long-term change in K-12 science education through professional development based on scientist-teacher partnerships and the creation of an online resource of tested, high-quality, California standards-based lessons;
• • Developing a cadre of future university faculty skilled in teaching science as inquiry at all levels, including the college level, where they will soon be teaching introductory science at all levels; and
• • Training future university science faculty to be effective mentors to students from all backgrounds.

UCSF will achieve these goals by bridging the distinct cultures of science and education, linking early-career UCSF scientists (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) with talented undergraduates and with teachers and students from SFUSD in programs designed and led by SEP. Alberts will serve as project director of the HHMI-funded SEP program, called "Links: Partnerships for Science Teaching and Learning." "This model will create powerful and sustainable new synergies in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally as UCSF postdoctoral fellows and graduate students become leading scientists in universities across the nation," Alberts said. In this video interview conducted in October 2005, Alberts discusses his role at the NAS and his ideas for advancing science education through SEP. He also shares his insight as a boy born and raised in Chicago, and how his interest in science started. Distinguished Career
During his tenure at the NAS, Alberts led the organization to respond to the dramatic advances in science and technology. Soon after arriving in Washington, DC, for example, Alberts responded to the birth of the Internet in 1994 by having all new scientific reports posted online, and even directing the NAS to spend a great deal of time and expense to post previous scientific reports for all to benefit from the research. Alberts also helped lead the National Science Education Standards (NSES) project, which occupied a great deal of his time during the first two years of his presidency at the NAS. The resulting 250-page NSES report, released in 1996 contains many recommendations on revamping the content of science classes, and offers suggestions on teaching techniques. More than 250,000 copies of the report have been distributed nationwide, and the voluntary national standards detailed in it have been influential in shaping state science education standards that have subsequently been adopted by most states across the country. In many ways, the NSES report articulated the common sense and hands-on approach to problem solving that Alberts had expressed on numerous occasions while at UCSF. Today, one of his lasting legacies is SEP, now a national model for helping both teachers and elementary school students better understand science. Recently, Alberts was among those appointed by UCSF Chancellor Mike Bishop, MD, as a member of the strategic planning board to help guide the future direction of the health sciences university. The board, co-chaired by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Eugene Washington, MD, and Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, is charged with developing a comprehensive, integrated strategic plan based on academic priorities. "I see this planning exercise as a terrific opportunity to envision where we would like UCSF to be in 15 or 20 years, so that we can begin to move the university in some unique and highly innovative directions," said Alberts. Born in 1938 in Chicago, Illinois, Alberts graduated from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a degree in biochemical sciences. He earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1965. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1966, and after 10 years was appointed professor and vice chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. In 1980, he was awarded the honor of an American Cancer Society Lifetime Research Professorship. In 1985, he was named chair of the UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Alberts served on the advisory board of the National Science Resources Center, a joint project of the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution working with teachers, scientists, and school systems to improve teaching of science, as well as on the National Academy of Sciences' National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment. He is one of the original authors of Molecular Biology of the Cell, considered the leading textbook of its kind and used widely in US colleges and universities. Alberts' most recent text, Essential Cell Biology (1998), is intended to approach this subject matter for a wider audience. Links: Science & Health Education Partnership: Bolstering Science Education in Public Schools Bruce Alberts Interview: Science, May 20, 2005 HHMI Awards $86.4 Million for Undergraduate Science Education