The 2010 Genetics Society of America Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education: Utpal Banerjee

THE Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education was created to honor significant and, more importantly, sustained impact on genetics education. This year this award is given to Utpal Banerjee in recognition of his enormous innovations in both laboratory and classroom education in genetics and biology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Utpal received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. He did his postdoctoral training with Seymour Benzer at Caltech, where he started his work in the neurobiology of Drosophila. He is now the Irving and Jean Stone Professor and the Chair of the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at UCLA, as well as a professor in the Biological Chemistry Department in the Geffen School of Medicine and a member of the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. Finally, Utpal serves as the Co-Director of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center.

Utpal's research has long been focused on eye development in Drosophila and, in particular, on the role of Ras signaling in the establishment of photoreceptors. More recently, he has turned his attention to the hematopoietic system of Drosophila, identifying signaling pathways and transcriptional regulators important for blood cell development. The list of articles and truly major research accomplishments is far too long to be summarized here. Rather, the goal of this essay is to recognize Utpal's equally impressive and extensive commitment to teaching. This award from the Genetics Society of America is not the first time that Banerjee's accomplishments in teaching have received awards and attention. In 2000, UCLA named Banerjee one of the “Top 20 Professors” of the “Bruin Century.” He has also been recognized with the Luckman, Ebi, and Gold Shield awards, the highest research and teaching awards in any subject, including humanities and social sciences, at UCLA.

Utpal is highly committed to bringing research closer to students by involving them in real life experiments over an extended time. To this end, he has designed large-scale genetics and genomics projects involving hundreds of undergraduates in research. Utpal is among 40 professors to be recognized nationally as Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professors and awarded a large grant to creatively introduce undergraduate students to research training.

Rather than exposing the students to predetermined laboratory exercises, Utpal has the students perform various screens in Drosophila and then perform a deeper analysis of the genomic sequences combined with molecular work to gain first-hand experience at the bench. During this project, the first screen involved testing essential genes to identify potential involvement in eye development. The mutants were obtained from public stock centers, and the students then took these mutations through a series of crosses and tested their effects on eye development.

The preliminary description of this project, which both established a proof of principle and characterized 1375 recessive-lethal autosomal mutants for their effects on eye development using the FLP–FRT assay, was published in the February 2005 issue of PLoS Biology (Chen et al. 2005; http://www.hhmi.org/news/banerjee.html). The article had 148 coauthors—including 134 undergraduate students. The full report, which characterized more than 2100 mutants on both the X chromosome and the autosomes, was described in an article published in Genetics in the fall of 2007 (Call et al. 2007). This article had 264 undergraduates as authors, most of whom were in their first or second year of college. As Utpal notes in the discussion of this article, “the main goal… is to involve undergraduate students in real scientific research early in their undergraduate career, while also educating them about scientific research as a way of thinking, analyzing, and interrelating concepts learned in didactic lectures” (pp. 694–695).

In a second screen, initiated four years ago, students have utilized a novel lineage system, G-TRACE, to characterize expression of over 700 genes during the development of the brain, blood, eye, and wing (http://www.bruinfly.ucla.edu), The G-TRACE system itself was developed by the Banerjee lab largely through the efforts of undergraduate students, 10 of whom are authors of a proof-of-principle article published in the August 2009 issue of Nature Methods (Evans et al. 2009). A second article describing the full results of the screen is planned, again with over 250 undergraduate authors.

One of the real accomplishments of this enormous effort was to create a sense of ownership of the research project in the minds of the students. Again, quoting from the discussion of the Call et al. (2007) article, “Each student worked on 10 individual mutant stocks, …. While working with these stocks, the students gained a sense of ownership of them. The student was the only person responsible for the maintenance, successful recombination, data collection, and website creation for each stock” (p. 695). Indeed, as stated on the HHMI website, Utpal's philosophy is: “Each student has to do whatever it takes—PCR, computer analysis, sequencing—to figure out why the mutations are doing what they're doing”(http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/spring2005/upfront/fly.html).

The real accomplishment and insight here is to recognize experimental science as a “performance art”—something that can only be learned by doing “real science” in the presence of a skilled teacher. Utpal's students begin as first- or second-year undergraduates doing genetics experiments in which the outcome is not predetermined; it is truly discovery-based science. Their abilities improve as they progress through subsequent years in the program, with the best of each group of students being admitted into an upper-division honors program.

The accomplishment of such a huge laboratory-based effort is indeed impressive. Still these are difficult financial times, and many colleges and universities are becoming progressively less able to offer relatively expensive undergraduate laboratory courses. To address this problem, Utpal has also created a sustainable undergraduate program at UCLA based on a “seminar deconstruction course,” in which students listen to a research seminar given by a top-level scientist and then spend the remaining classes studying individual pieces of the seminar, which is used as a platform to teach fundamental concepts and essential scientific techniques in the context of a cutting-edge research project. In doing so, the students effectively deconstruct a scientific presentation and learn the process of scientific analysis—from defining initial questions and hypotheses to carefully designing appropriate experiments to analyzing data and drawing scientific conclusions. This is an exciting new form of classroom-based science education that is beautifully described in an article published last year in PLoS Biology (Clark et al. 2009).

Congratulations, Utpal, on being a most deserving recipient of this award. The award was named for Elizabeth Jones, who was also its first recipient. Thus the standard for having this award bestowed is high. It is a standard that Utpal, through creative, caring, and tireless effort, has fully met.

Figure 1.

Utpal Banerjee