Keyword: microbiology

CMU students connect to global project

Near the end of a research leave that I spent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had the opportunity to train as a partner instructor in the Tiny Earth program that's headquartered there. This program, launched in 2018, is a microbiology lab curriculum being pursued by a growing international network of students and instructors. The program's goal is to "studentsource" the discovery of new antibiotics—one avenue of response to the emerging crisis of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria. Tiny Earth is the brainchild of one of my scientific and pedagogical heroes: Jo Handelsman, a soil microbiologist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at UW Madison.

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CMU biology major co-authors paper published in landmark science journal

Levi Klassen's (CMU '22) second week working at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) changed abruptly and without warning, pitching him into an expedited project running from May to November researching and analyzing treatments for the recent outbreak of mpox (the disease formerly known as monkeypox).

A summer of what he thought would be spent organizing files and aiding with odd jobs relating to research ended up leading to publishing a report in the landmark journal Science Translational Medicine in November. Because of his valuable contributions, Klassen, in affiliation with Canadian Mennonite University (CMU), received co-first authorship on the report.

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