Course Based Undergraduate Research experiences (CUREs) are a high impact teaching practice shown to lead to enhanced retention as well as providing an effective mechanism to provide research experiences to all students. We have designed a laboratory sequence that incorporates the seven CURE elements: Relevance, Scientific Background, Hypothesis Development, Proposal, Experiments/Teamwork to test hypothesis, Data Analysis and Conclusions, and Presentation and implemented it in a second semester General Chemistry course. Over a six week period students explore prior knowledge, formulate a hypothesis to be tested, design and perform a combination of computational and wetlab experiments to explore intermolecular interactions between Malate Dehydrogenase as the drug target and potential compounds that might be lead compounds for drug development. Students collect and quantitatively analyze data to test their hypothesis using molecular modeling and docking studies and wetlab techniques such as spectroscopy, kinetics, binding and titration studies, allowing them to draw evidence based conclusions. Students will give brief informal presentations of background, their hypothesis and their methodology and proposed data analysis while learning the techniques they will use to interogate their hypothesis. After conducting their proposed experiments, the project concludes with a formal presentation describing the rationale for their project, their results, and conclusions. A variety of student centered assessment data will be collected and compared with control goups (labs without the CURE elements) .

Development of a 2nd semester general chemistry CURE laboratory focused on antimalarial drug design

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.