Although from 1938 to 1952 his name was a mystery to the University community, today the name Quantrell is synonymous with excellence in undergraduate teaching. Ernest Quantrell, who made his anonymous donation more than six decades ago, created an endowment that was unique in American higher education. He created a monetary award that would be presented annually to faculty members in recognition of their excellence in teaching undergraduate students. His anonymity prevailed for more than a decade, but in 1952, Quantrell, a University Trustee, added to his gift and consented to be acknowledged as the donor. At that time he also named the award for his parents. The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching is the nation’s oldest prize given for undergraduate teaching. The Division of the Biological Sciences is proud to recognize the achievements of two of its community members, Martin Feder, Ph.D., and David Jablonski, Ph.D., whose excellence as teachers of undergraduate students has been recognized with this award.

Feder, Professor in Organismal Biology & Anatomy, had tried for years to explain to the students in his undergraduate physiology course how hemoglobin in the bloodstream takes oxygen from the lungs and delivers it to cells throughout the body.

“It’s a fairly complex interaction of four different protein subunits and the chemical groups to which they are attached,” said Feder, Professor in Organismal Biology & Anatomy. He tried blackboard diagrams, displaying various models and assigning special readings. “It never really got across.”

Then he put together a multimedia electronic demonstration, complete with sound effects and moving images to describe the process. “Everybody got it,” he said.

The way he sees it, human knowledge spans a continuum that grades almost imperceptibly from one body of knowledge into another. “In the life sciences, you can no longer tell where molecular biology leaves off and genetics begins, or where evolutionary biology leaves off and physiology begins. It’s all a continuum,” Feder said.

And at the center of this continuum is physiology, with molecules, cells, tissues, organs and organ systems on one end, and populations, communities and ecosystems on the other. “In order to understand the center, you have to understand both ends,” he said.

Jablonski, William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences and Chair of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, has told the story of Biological Evolution nearly every Fall Quarter since he created the course in the late 1980s, and his way of telling it has earned him a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

“The story of life is a spectacular, strange, quirky history where there are booms and there are busts,” said Jablonski. “There are fantastic explosions of evolutionary creativity. There are times of stagnation. There are extremely dramatic crashes, like the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs because of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. It’s just a very dramatic story. And it’s a great vehicle for teaching the principles of evolutionary biology, which is really what this course is all about.”

Jablonski loves teaching NatSci 103, he says, because “it lets me reach beyond my usual scientific audiences, it forces me to keep up with fields way outside my own specialty and students are great. I’ve had students jump ahead of me in the course—for example, working out, on the spot, the possibility of species selection, where natural selection operates at the species level instead of just on individual bodies. They’ve worked out some of the stranger implications of mimicry, in which one species evolves to resemble another.

- Excerpted from stories by Steve Koppes, The University of Chicago Chronicle


EDUCATION



The Division of the Biological Sciences is proud to announce the appointment of Geoffrey Greene, Ph.D., as the Chairman of the Committee on Cancer Biology, effective July 1, 2004, for a three-year term.

Dr. Greene is currently the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research in the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He is also the Associate Director of Basic Sciences in the University of Chicago Cancer Research Center. Dr. Greene received his B.A. in chemistry from the College of Wooster and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Northwestern University and then joined the Ben May faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980 after receiving postdoctoral training in Dr. Elwood Jensen’s laboratory.


Dr. Geoffrey Greene


Dr. Greene has made a number of fundamental discoveries in biochemical endocrinology with significant application to cancer. While working with Dr. Jensen, he purified estrogen receptor (ER) from calf uterus and prepared the first known antibodies to a steroid receptor. He went on to observe that ER was localized in the nucleus of target cells in the absence of hormone, thus altering the prevailing viewpoint that steroid receptors were translocated from the cytoplasm to the nucleus by hormone. Most recently, Dr. Greene and collaborators reported the crystallographic three-dimensional structures of the human ER alpha hormone binding domain complexed with estradiol and with raloxifene followed by determinations a year later of the molecular structures of ER alpha complexed with DES and 4-hydroxytamoxifen.

As one would expect, seminal work of this caliber has garnered Dr. Greene several awards, including the Ernst Oppenheimer Award from the Endocrine Society, the John Brewer istinguished Alumni Lectureship at Northwestern, the first Tartikoff-Semel Award from the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research Program, and the position of Inaugural Lecturer in the Olof Pearson Lectureship at Case Western Reserve University.

Dr. Greene has been very active in the Committee on Cancer Biology from its inception in 1994, serving on the Cancer Biology Steering Committee and the Cancer Biology Curriculum Committee. He has continuously taught courses in the undergraduate and graduate curricula and has trained a significant number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in his laboratory.

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