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Tuajuanda Jordan, HHMI senior program officer will direct SEA, with the help of computer and administrative staff. HHMI Professor Graham Hatfull will be the lead scientist on the phage genomics initiative and will oversee a pilot of the bacteriophage course at University of Pittsburgh in the 2007–2008 academic year.
SEA will also rely heavily on the expertise and advice of three scientific advisors. A. Malcolm Campbell directs the HHMI-supported Genome Consortium for Active Teaching—an initiative that distributes genomics research tools to faculty across the globe—at Davidson College in North Carolina. Brad Goodner, HHMI undergraduate program director at Hiram College in Ohio, has run several bacterial genomics research courses in the last decade and directs the Hiram Genomics Initiative. And HHMI professor Sarah C.R. Elgin of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri runs the Genomics Education Partnership—a program that allows students at primarily undergraduate institutions to collaborate on genomics research via the Internet.
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 Tuajuanda Jordan
Tuajuanda Jordan joined HHMI in 2006 as senior program officer for science education, a role she is well suited for and to which she brought lots of hands-on experience.
Jordan earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville. After earning her Ph.D. in biochemistry at Purdue University, she became a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Before moving into administration, Jordan led the effort to update the biochemistry curriculum, which included required courses in genomics and proteomics. In 2005, Jordan was named associate vice president for academic affairs at Xavier.
Jordan has devoted much of her professional career mentoring students and working with programs designed to retain underrepresented minorities in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines. Additionally, she is a member of the NIH MORE division's Minority Access to Research Careers subcommittee, an ad hoc member of the National Human Genome Research Initiative's Minority Action Plan review panel, and has served as the chair of NIH's Minority Biomedical Research Support program and on numerous NIH and NSF scientific review panels.
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 A. Malcolm Campbell
Malcolm Campbell teaches molecular biology, genomics, and synthetic biology at his alma mater, Davidson College in North Carolina. He is currently a professor of biology and the founding director of the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching, a nonprofit, international educational consortium of faculty dedicated to bringing DNA microarrays and analysis software into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. More than 150 colleges in the US, Canada, and Australia have taken part in GCAT, representing approximately 5,000 undergraduates using DNA microarrays in experiments.
In collaboration with Davidson mathematician Laurie J. Heyer, Campbell wrote the genomics textbook Discovering Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics, second edition (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Benjamin Cummings, 2006). Throughout his career, Campbell has been dedicated to conducting pedagogical research, giving educational workshops at national meetings, and finding ways to use the Internet to enhance science education. From 2002–2005, Campbell was co-Editor-in-Chief of Cell Biology Education. His scientific research focuses on bioinformatics and synthetic biology projects that blend mathematics, computing, and biology.
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 Sarah C.R. Elgin
Sally Elgin is an HHMI professor and Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts and Sciences and a professor of biology, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, professor of genetics, and professor of education at Washington University in St. Louis. She graduated from Pomona College with a B.S. in chemistry and received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, working in the laboratory of James Bonner, exploring the role of nonhistone chromosomal proteins. She did postdoctoral research with Leroy Hood, also at Caltech. With Hood, she developed tools to characterize chromatin in Drosophila. After a move to a faculty position at Harvard, work with her students led to a method to determine the distribution of specific proteins in the polytene chromosomes by using immunofluorescence and to methods for analyzing the nucleosome array, including identification of accessible regulatory sites (HS sites). View More
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 Brad Goodner
Brad Goodner has been teaching molecular and cellular biology, genetics, microbiology, genomics, and bioinformatics to undergraduate students for 13 years. He is currently an associate professor of biology and the Edward J. Smerek Chair of Mathematics, the Sciences, & Technology at Hiram College in Ohio. He directs the Hiram Genomics Initiative, a program supported by a grant from HHMI that involves undergraduate and high school students in genomics research through courses. His research uses genetics and genomics to study the lifestyle of several soil bacteria species.
For the last eight years, Goodner has incorporated bacterial genomics research into his molecular and cellular biology, genetics, and bioinformatics courses by having students annotate genome sequences and generate and characterize gene knock-out mutants. Having spent a great deal of time speaking at faculty workshops and conferences, he understands the hurdles that faculty at small colleges face when introducing this research-in-teaching concept to their classrooms.
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 Graham F. Hatfull
Graham F. Hatfull is an HHMI professor and professor and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. He received a B.Sc. in biological sciences from Westfield College, University of London, and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Edinburgh University. He did postdoctoral work at Yale University in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, with Nigel Grindley, and at the Medical Research Council at Cambridge University, with Bart Barrell. View More
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 Elizabeth Summer
Elizabeth Summer joined the advisory board of the National Genomics Research Initiative early in 2008. Currently, Summer is a research scientist in the Department of Biochemistry/Biophysics at Texas A & M University. She developed and runs the Phage Genomics for Undergraduates program, funded by the National Science Foundation, at Texas A & M.
Summer earned her Ph.D. on plant RNA viruses at the University of South Carolina. From there she engaged in research on chloroplast membrane protein targeting and evolution at the universities of Georgia, Florida, and Texas A & M.
More than 100 students are involved in sequencing 20 plus new phage genomes. Hosts of these phages include Burkholderia, Erwinia, and Rhodococcus. Summer directs phage isolation, DNA library preparation and sequencing by the students, and teaches a lecture class on phage genomics at Texas A & M.
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SEA Staff
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 Lucia Barker
Lucia Barker, program officer for SEA, received her B.S. at the University of Minnesota and her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, Columbia. She did her post-doctoral research in bacterial pathogenesis with Stanley Falkow at Stanford University and with Pamela Small at the NIAID Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. She was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota Medical School before joining the SEA team. Barker has long been involved in science education training and outreach including working with science interns at the Children's Museum of Manhattan and developing curriculum for the PBS program Nature.
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 Kevin Bradley
Kevin Bradley is the technician for the NPGRI. Located in the SEA lab at Janelia Farm he is working to refine and develop protocols for use in the wet lab phase of the project. Bradley is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. While earning his B.S. in microbiology, he worked with Dr. Graham Hatfull as a lab tech and an undergraduate researcher in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professorship Phage Hunting Program. As a phage hunter, Bradley also mentored high school students working on parallel research projects in the lab. His involvement in science education has also involved teaching adolescents at Pittsburgh's Shuman Center about HIV pathogenesis and volunteering time as a presenter at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Thermo Fisher Biotechnology Lab.
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 Matthew Conte
Matthew Conte is the bioinformatics specialist for SEA. He graduated with B.S. and M.S. degrees in bioinformatics from Rochester Institute of Technology. He moved on as a faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland's Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, College Park, under the tutelage of Michael Cummings. During those summers, Conte was a course assistant for the Workshop on Molecular Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
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 Melvina Lewis
Melvina Lewis, the SEA Program Assistant, worked in adult education as a computer instructor/course coordinator. Prior to coming to HHMI, Lewis taught basic software techniques to allied health students at ACT College and received the Director's Award for Teaching Excellence from the allied health school. A native of Washington, DC, she received her BA in communications from Trinity College.
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Elizabeth Summer and Staff Photos: James Kegley
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