Integrating Research and Education in an
Interdisciplinary
Evolutionary Computation Course: Crystallographic
Case Study
Dr. Maggie Eppstein
Department of Computer Science
Date:
Time:
Location: 367 Votey
Abstract
During the fall semester of 2004, Jim Hoffmann (Botany) and I designed and co-taught a course in evolutionary computation (EC), aimed at both graduate and advanced undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines. In order to attract and motivate students from biologically-related disciplines as well as from more technical areas, the course was designed to include multidisciplinary team projects using a case-study of a real-world problem in computational biology. Several criteria were identified that a real-world application would have to meet in order to be doable within the constraints of a half-semester project, and ultimately a difficult multi-modal problem in x-ray crystallography related to protein structure determination was selected. Despite the simplifications necessary for incorporating this into a ½ semester project format, interesting insights were gained towards solution of this important real-world problem in protein structure determination, and one project was subsequently expanded into an accepted conference research paper. Although the students came from diverse backgrounds in computer science, engineering, and life sciences, the interdisciplinary teams enabled students to synergize their complementary strengths. We outline our experience with this academic case study in a real-world crystallography problem, summarize what aspects of the pedagogy contributed to the success of the project, and give minor suggestions for improvement to the instructional model for future courses. We conclude that incorporating real-world case studies into interdisciplinary courses is an effective way to motivate and train budding interdisciplinary researchers, and can also yield useful advancements in basic research in the domain area.