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Teacher Researchers Partner with WashU Faculty to Ignite Curiosity in Students

By middle school and high school, most students in the U.S. are familiar with the terms MRI and CT scan. Chances are, they know these diagnostic imaging tools are used when physicians need to see parts of the body in a different light.

But do they understand the underlying physics of biomedical imaging? Do they see the mathematics in it? 

Abinav Jha and Alex Messina share a desire to reach students early to foster curiosity about science.

To Abhinav Jha, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of radiology at WashU, helping students early on understand the physical phenomenon can also stimulate their interest in mathematics.

“They say that mathematics is the language in which the universe is written,” says Jha. “It is very much the language in which a lot of the physical phenomena for imaging is written. If middle and high school kids can see how math and imaging are so linked, they can see math in a different light, too. At the University, I have the privilege of talking to graduate and undergraduate students all the time, but how do you convey the essence of an advanced science concept to a high school student?”

For that, Jha leaned into the expertise of Alex Messina. Messina teaches science at St. Charles High School, and with ten years of teaching experience, he’s been the perfect partner to help Jha develop learning modules that are understandable to this younger audience of learners.

“Knowing where students are going to get hung up can be really hard without having experience,” says Messina. “Inexplicably, they will take something in a direction I’m not expecting. You have to adapt like an improv actor. A lot of my job is asking clarifying questions and level-setting.”

Jha and Messina participated in the Summer 2024 Teacher Researcher Partnership Program. Administered by WashU’s Institute for School Partnership (ISP), the program is designed specifically to provide opportunities for faculty to connect in meaningful ways with educators in the broader community and to provide professional development for K-12 teachers to gain new experiences and skills. The collaboration was a win-win.

For Messina, working with Jha and the graduate students in the Danforth Campus lab was an opportunity to put himself back into the seat of a learner. He developed two educational tools (one computer-based, the other hands-on) that can be used to demonstrate the deeper components of imaging.

“I went into the lab thinking I was going to be doing computational math, but a lot of what I worked on was translating something that’s seemingly magic and making it into something understandable. I want my students to feel that way too.”

Alex Messina, Science Teacher, St. Charles High School

For Jha, reaching students early has value for everyone: students, the field and the community.

“If students in the St. Louis region get interested and excited about the field early, they can start thinking about where to get the knowledge they need to study imaging further. WashU is one of only two institutions in the U.S. with an exclusive PhD program in imaging science,” says Jha.

Getting to the heart of it

Nathaniel Huebsch, associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at WashU’s McKelvey School of Engineering, is also keen to engage young learners in his current research focusing on cardiac physiology and mechanobiology.

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the research has an ideal audience.

“For growing science and recruiting more people into science, high school students are an ideal audience,” Huebsch says. “This research has implications for human health, and human health is a pretty compelling reason for learning science. To do this effectively, I needed someone who’s an expert on communicating complicated scientific ideas to high school students.” 

He needed Sarah Scerba. She teaches honors biology and biology at Lafayette High School in the Rockwood District. Scerba’s been teaching for six years and is also very comfortable in lab environments, having done research in cholesterol and diabetes at the University of Iowa. She was eager to participate in the Summer Teacher Researcher Program, hoping to take away new ideas that would ignite curiosity for herself and her students.

WashU’s Nate Huebsch welcomed Lafayette High School biology teacher Sarah Scerba into his lab over the summer to co-create lessons that will show students the real-world applications of his research.

“There are students who are really interested in coming into the lab,” Scerba says. “I like teaching them about the research side of science. It’s something I can share with them that other teachers cannot because they don’t have a research background. You can actually see the excitement in students, so it’s pretty cool.”

Scerba and Huebsch collaborated over the summer to develop lessons that would ignite students’ curiosity about a real-world question Huebsch and his team are working to answer: why are so many seemingly healthy young people dying of sudden cardiac arrest?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that number is roughly 2,000 annually in the U.S. A common culprit is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a condition that causes the heart muscle to become abnormally thick and often goes undiagnosed because the person does not experience symptoms. The condition can be genetic, but in some cases is nonfamilial and caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors that cause heart muscle cells to arrange themselves differently, leading to irregular heartbeats. Studying the behavior of cells with a mutation that causes HCM can lead to the discovery of more ways to treat congenital heart disease. 

A summer in the lab observing in-vitro cells that mimic cardiac cells, comparing EKGs of normal hearts with those experiencing arrhythmias and watching the scientists working together to solve one problem leaves Scerba inspired and armed with what she needs to create lessons that bring her students along for research ride in a realistic way.

Huebsch loves this.

“We need to be teaching more than just facts. A lot of science is how we manage uncertainty. How do we design experiments so that the answers guide us to the next question? Often it may be even easier to understand if you start with the problem and think about how to go about figuring something out. We’re digging down into why, on a molecular level, HCM is happening.”

Nathaniel Huebsch, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, WashU

Accessible science from all the angles

After a summer in the WashU lab led by Jai Rudra, Clayton High School’s Mary Russo is ready to show her students the molecular aspects of chirality using 3-D printed models. Photo credit: Scott Kreher.

Mary Russo wears her lab coat while teaching chemistry at Clayton High School. She wore the same coat while teaching at St. Louis University High before that. The coat helps this teacher send a subtle, but important message to her students.

“Science is accessible. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to understand it,” says Russo, who feels as comfortable in the lab as a classroom.

Before teaching, she was a full-time research tech in a cardiology lab, studying alcohol and heart cells.

Russo’s comfort in a laboratory setting did not dampen her enthusiasm as she started her work this summer in the WashU lab led by Jai Rudra, associate professor of biomedical engineering. Rudra was looking to partner with a high school teacher to help develop lessons, labs and activities that introduce high school students to the molecular aspects of chirality. 

Chirality is a geometric characteristic that the structure of an object cannot superimpose with its mirror image. Scissors, shoes, even golf clubs are examples of objects that are chiral, or have handedness. 

Rudra aimed to introduce chirality using simple 3D-printed models of chiral peptides using the PyMol 3D visualization system. Russo, intrigued with the possibility of seeing the unseen through the use of models, had been modeling in her classrooms using pen and paper, then ball-and-stick models, but there were limitations. What Rudra suggested involved coding, and coding was new territory for Russo. She accepted the challenge.

“This summer, I got the opportunity to do a deep, messy dive with a computer modeling system, so I’ll be able to see all the angles, and all the places to start for my students’ discovery. When I’ve gotten back into the laboratory, it shows. My students lean in just a little bit more.”

Mary Russo, Chemistry Teacher, Clayton HS

The Summer Teacher Researcher Program is one of many ways the ISP provides campus-wide support for faculty to develop partnership and outreach opportunities with St. Louis area schools.

Learn more here.