Facilitator: Terry Lee Watson, BWMP LLC, Strategies for Justice

This workshop is designed to create awareness and build cultural competency strategies to maintain and sustain an inclusive environment and a sense of belonging within the spaces you occupy. The Crawl, Walk, Run workshops challenge participants to engage in honest, yet effective dialogue, reflecting on information received and experiences shared, to create an equity plan moving forward. Come ready to engage and learn from one another. 

Learning Outcomes

After this workshop, participants will be able to:  

• Recognize the multiple forms of cultural disruptiveness and its impact on building and maintaining an inclusive environment and building a sense of belonging. 
• Identify at least 1 specific barrier that may stop your organization from achieving its inclusive and belonging goals and how to overcome them. 
• Create a plan to continue an individual’s course of action to build and maintain an inclusive environment and build a sense of belonging. 

Facilitators: Mark Randa, Ph.D., Rowan College of South Jersey and Dave Westenberg, Ph.D., Missouri University of Science and Technology

Are we prepared for the next pandemic? Students and the general public often have misconceptions about infectious diseases, including about how society can prevent the next pandemic. Participants will explore BioInteractive resources that simulate the spread of infectious disease, examine how our immune response protects from disease and model vaccine effectiveness. Through this interactive workshop, participants will identify and discuss effective approaches to incorporate these resources in their own courses that will enhance student learning of infectious disease. Participants will need to bring their own laptop to this workshop. 

Learning Outcomes

After this workshop, participants will be able to:  

• Explore HHMI BioInteractive’s interactive Modeling Disease Spread resource. 
• Describe how the immune system modulates the spread of disease and examine the efficacy of vaccines as a control measure. 
• Utilize the SIR model to simulate the spread of infectious diseases within a population.  
• Explain the concepts of susceptible, infectious and recovered individuals, and how these populations evolve. 
• Simulate an outbreak by constructing SIR graphs.  
• Analyze and interpret SIR graphs to conceptualize the progression of an epidemic and identify key patterns. 
• Predict the impact of interventions such as vaccination on mitigating the spread of infectious diseases.  

Facilitators: Nancy Boury, Ph.D., Iowa State University and Rebecca Seipelt-Thiemann, Ph.D., Middle Tennessee State University

Participants will review the ASM fundamental Statements with an emphasis on Scientific Thinking and walk through how to use This Week in Microbiology (TWiM) episodes to illustrate basic principles of microbiology (Structure/Function, Information Flow, Evolution, Metabolism, Systems and Microbial Impact), lab techniques and scientific thinking. The workshop hosts will walk participants through the process of podcast annotation, where students listen to TWiM episodes and work collaboratively to create an annotation that connects the topics discussed in the podcast to ASM’s 27 fundamental statements, the 6 Vision and Change categories and the concepts they have learned in class. In addition, we will use papers presented in a podcast episode as the basis to create short figure-reading and science literacy exercises that are aligned to ASM’s curricular guidelines. Workshop participants (and their students) will be invited to contribute to an Open Education Resource as chapter-authors.  

Learning Outcomes

After this workshop, participants will be able to:  

• Connect core ASM content (Fundamental Statements & Scientific Thinking) to primary literature as presented by This Week in Microbiology (TWiM) hosts.  
• Guide their students through the process of creating a draft annotation, presenting that annotation, providing constructive feedback for peers and revising their annotations based on peer review.  
• Create short figure-reading and scientific literacy exercises based on primary literature presented by the TWiM hosts.  
• Contribute to a nascent Open Education Resource (OER) book that provides resources for teaching microbiology concepts based on the ASM curriculum guidelines and Vision & Change. 

Facilitators: Brian Gentry, Ph.D., Drake University and Carlos Goller, Ph.D., North Carolina State University

Join your fellow participants and speakers from the Getting Started in Biology Education Research webinar series for this workshop to build your DBER skills, get feedback on an in-progress research question and methods and find potential collaborators or mentors through networking. Please bring your in-progress research question(s), study context and design and questions that the group could help with.  

Prerequisites: Participants must have taken the Getting Started in Biology Education Research webinar series in 2022 or 2024. Eligibility will be confirmed by the webinar series registration roster. 

Facilitators: Ellen Dow, Ph.D. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Elisha Wood-Charlson, Ph.D., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

If you are interested in incorporating bioinformatics or data science concepts into a course, or working with students on data that is immediately publishable, then this workshop is for you! The workshop focuses on analyzing microbial data in the free, open source KBase platform, following a workflow that results in a publishable genomic dataset for an ASM Microbiology Resource Announcement.  

This workshop will provide examples of how educators use KBase (kbase.us) with their students—from CUREs to independent research. Participants will be introduced to resources developed through the Program for Microbiome Workforce Development (NSF #2316244) and KBase Educators (bit.ly/kbase-edu), including teaching and template workflows to analyze raw data and streamline data publications. Together, we will go through steps in the data analysis to publication process, starting with an example isolate or metagenome dataset. We will also introduce the importance of good sample metadata and environmental ontologies. Everyone will have access to these tools and resources after the workshop to use with their students and adapt for future use!  

Target Audience: Relevant for educators who want to integrate (new, more, any) computational biology tools and resources into their courses, support student-curated data publications or just change up existing course-based undergraduate research experiences.  

Prerequisites: A basic understanding of genome assembly and annotation, currently teaching or planning to teach courses and/or independent student research that include computational biology, bioinformatics and isolate or community-based microbiology data analysis.