News Release

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute will award The Johns Hopkins University a four-year, $2.2 million grant to expand and improve undergraduate science education in the university's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

HHMI announced today $80 million in education grants to universities nationwide. Competition for the grants, offered by HHMI to universities with programs designed to bring teaching and research closer together, is by invitation only and takes place once every four years. This year, HHMI named 44 winners from 189 applicants. Grants range from $1.2 million to $2.2 million; Johns Hopkins is one of only seven universities to receive a full $2.2 million grant.

"This is the fourth time in a row that we've been successful in this highly competitive program," said Gary Ostrander, associate dean for research in the Krieger School and principal investigator on the new HHMI grant. "We're thrilled at the opportunities it will provide to make our already outstanding science education programs even better, and grateful for HHMI's help in keeping our classrooms on the cutting edge of research."

The new funding will be used in a number of contexts. Part of the grant will support a summer program that allows undergraduate students to participate in research in the labs of distinguished Johns Hopkins faculty members. Students for the program will be drawn from Johns Hopkins and from universities with high enrollments of students who belong to ethnic groups underrepresented in the sciences.

In addition, the new grant money will support new laboratories and equipment in neuroscience, geobiology, biochemistry and biophysics; and help fund a center for education resources that instructors can use to revamp introductory biology courses.

Finally, the grant money will fund expanded opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to hone their science teaching skills in undergraduate classrooms.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a medical research organization whose principal mission is biomedical research. HHMI employs 336 Hughes investigators who conduct basic medical research in HHMI laboratories at 70 medical centers and universities nationwide, including the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Through its complementary grants program, the institute supports science education in the United States and a select group of biomedical scientists abroad.

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HHMI Grant News