@BiffBrown : Me and another alumni friend wondered if this project went anywhere. So glad to see it did! Also, if you read his story, it highlights how grades can be over-rated in terms of aptitude for a subject or passion for it. Grades often measure levels of obedience. However, what is cool is that this emerged from a challenged from Dr. Spell’s class! Apparently one of her take home quizzes asked students for ways to address that issue. That year she pretty much did her first theme based year apparently and Ebola was it. The past 2 years, I think Zika virus has been the theme. Always nice to know that there are instructors left at research universities that do encourage creativity. Emory still has some of them. Back in the day, it apparently used to be the honors classes (the project lab mentioned in the article below was a part of the honors offerings which existed before 2009 or so. Chemistry had an honors intro. course, biology had one, and honors physiology, genetics, and like a couple more. I think to mitigate the absence of such special options, biology gone toward “inquiry based labs” at the intro. level for better or worse. Beyond that, only ecology and microbiology meet this requirement to any extent. Chemistry has some interesting developments in analytical and physical and NBB has the neurophysiology lab) driving the entrepreneurial tendencies in STEM at Emory:http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2012/spring/features/solazyme.html . Solazyme is such an example (really cool! Harrison Dillon actually did his PhD at the University of Utah’s biosciences program which I have chosen to attend! This I didn’t know until I started looking at alum).
Now-a-days Emory has many lone wolves that foster this interest in research and creative thinking. Folks like Dr. Spell, Eisen, Weinert, Soria, David Lynn (via the freshman or senior ORDER seminar) and quite a few NBB instructors (like this list, mainly the lecturers). They either make their class more inquiry based, design activities and problems that are more open ended, or give students much more exposure to research (Eisen, Weinert, and the NBB faculty I refer to often requiring lots of reading and presentation of primary literature or even writing of NSF or NIH style research proposals).
Either way, seems the entrepreneurial thing really has momentum at Emory and has had it for maybe like the last 5 years. Another example of how it does not appear super shiny on paper, but many awesome things are happening on the inside for those who want to be a part of these types of things.