I started playing the flute when I was in sixth grade, well over 20 years ago. Now, my interest in playing the flute stemmed from listening to Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf in the car when I was a little kid. Peter and the Wolf is a children's story where each of the characters is represented by an instrument or group of instruments in the orchestra, and the bird is represented by the flute. As you just heard, I still play flute and I play piccolo still as well. My journey as a musician has resulted in several interesting endeavors, from marching at the assembly in my senior year of college, to my antics with the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band in Atlanta, Georgia, which included marching in Dragon Con. My adventures with the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable also included learning how to hulu, while playing piccolo the same time. Over the last 20 plus years, music has been a central part of my life. I met my husband through band, and almost all of my most valuable and meaningful friendships were made through band. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh doesn't have a school of music. The marching band was populated not with music majors, but with students majoring in a wide variety of subject areas. That was when I first noticed that people who persist in music beyond the point where their parents make them go, do tend to be the sci-ency people too. I saw this trend again in the community ensembles that I played in. Whether it was a church orchestra, the marching abominable band, there [inaudible] representation of people in the STEM careers; Scientists, Doctors, Nurses, Dentist and Engineers. I've often wondered about the science music connection. Why do scientists gravitate towards the Arts? Are the sciences and the arts really as different as we're led to believe? The way education works right now, it's easy to believe the different disciplines exist in isolation. For example, we have science class with a science teacher, we have music class with a music teacher and we have English class with an English teacher. When I'm not playing the flute or chatting with people about biology, I work on breaking down these barriers between seemingly different disciplines. I want to be able to help students make connections between, for example, music and science, or helping teachers and other professionals learn how to teach through an interdisciplinary lens and collaborate with colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds. This last course is dedicated to just that, exploring how biology relates to very different disciplines. This course draws on my experience connecting biology to aspects of my life, like music, the perspectives of my former non-science major students and their efforts to connect the science of life to their majors and interests, and of course, my own research sitting at the intersection of Biology, Education and Psychology. In this first module, we'll explore the arts in biology, why I argue that artists foundational biological science and how biology tells us about our experience with the arts, and in particular with music. I'll also offer some thoughts and science education reforms, particularly the STEAM Movement, adding an "A" to arts among science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEAM. In the second module, we'll switch to the business of biology. We'll talk about business models of biological research with a specific eye to the development of new treatments, human clinical trials, and how well certain things get funded by federal or private agencies. In the third and fourth modules will explore two topics in the interface of psychology and biology. Module three presents a mash-up of a course typically [inaudible] psychology department, human growth and development, and when typically taught in Biology Departments, Developmental Biology, to present a view of how we go from a single cell to a fully functioning adult human. Module four explores the psychology about how we reason and make decisions for biologically relevant concepts in our own lives. Finally, in Module five, we'll talk about Biology Education more broadly and wrap up the specialization and proposed future directions for your consideration. With that, will start exploring Biology in a unique leg at the intersection with other disciplines.
