Elgin receives NSF grant for classroom research project

Elgin

Sarah Elgin, PhD, the Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a $625,046 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Effective Implementation of a Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE): Testing, Optimizing and Extending a Bioinformatics Project.”

The grant will provide funding for the Genomics Education Partnership, which Elgin founded, to examine how to optimize a class-based research experience using a bioinformatics research project. The group also will be working on curriculum and strategies to make the research experience accessible to beginning college students.

Elgin is a professor of biology and of education, both in Arts & Sciences, and of genetics, in the School of Medicine. Her scientific work centers on epigenetics in Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, with an emphasis on heterochromatin formation.