HAPS

The HAPS (Human Anatomy and Physiology Society) conference was this past week. Some of you have heard me talk about it as a teaching conference. I went with Dr. Cafferty, the lecture track professor I have been working with for the last 3 years in the undergrad physiology course. We presented a poster looking at if some of the group activities we had incorporated into our course were actually effective in helping the students learn. The short answer is maybe for some of the students. This poster was the best attended one that I have had so far, likely in part because ways of engaging a classroom might be more broadly applicable than how protein X affects protein Y in a specific cell type. One of the people who stopped by was the person who had originally developed the case studies we were using in our group activities. He was pretty interested in our findings.

Speaking of other people I got to meet at the conference. I met Dee Unglaub Silverthorn. This is the author of the physiology textbook I loved from undergrad. I only saved 4 textbooks and this is one of them. She was actually very nice and was very encouraging on career advice. I also ran into my old friend Albert and got to catch up on what we have each been up to since we saw each other last. 

Conferences usually have lots of vendors. For the basic research conferences I have been going to the vendors usually sell testtubes or antibodies. These vendors were much more interesting. The were selling the anatomy models that you can take apart, synthetic practice dissection organs, and "Body World" style anatomical models. I talked to the body world type company for a while about the actual process of making the models. It involves a vacuum, a large vat of acetone, and lots of plastic. Not only did these vendors have cooler things to sell, they also had better give aways. One booth gave me a cookie printed with a picture of a neuromuscular junction. There were also lots of text book companies. One of them was having a contest for illustrations of concepts confusing to students. I won second place in the contest and got a polka dotted mug as a prize. 

The second night of the conference there was a screening of some educational films made by HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute). We watched ones on skin pigmentation, microscopic organisms and AR Wallace. The films were well done, I especially enjoyed the artistry in the "animated" series; it was all paper puppetry and very impressive. I was already familiar with the research arm of HHMI: they are very influential and do a phenomenal job of funding really groundbreaking work in basic research. Many of these findings are the basis for impressive translational discoveries. I was completely unaware of the educational branch of HHMI, which to my first impression from this conference is equally impressive in scope and quality. I went to a workshop during the conference that featured resources freely available for teaching about genetics of cancer. The workshop was very useful and I was impressed by the many resources the institute had made. The film screening was accompanied by a swanky reception with fancy food and a talk by the research featured in the skin documentary. He works on zebrafish genetics which led him to the discovery of a single gene responsible for pigmentation predominate in Asian populations. He is also doing incredible work in developing micro CT scans. He has partnered with the Syncatron to create CT scans of small organisms (most notably mutant and wild type zebrafish) with microscopic level resolution. The idea is to look at organizational conservation at a level that has previously been impossible. It is a very interesting project. 

Because this was a conference attended almost exclusively by educators, all of the presenters were really good. Also most of the presentation topics were presented for a very broad audience which always helps maintain the focus on the very big picture of importance. Some of my favorite talks were: 1) using gaze patterns to track whether anatomy students have actually learned and will remember the different organs and structures they are shown. 2) using robotics to understand which parts of a person's gait are most regulated in the system. The body preserves the position of the foot relative to the hip by compensating the other joints. This is relevant for rehabilitation. Also using robotics and pressure sensors to understand how flamingo's maintain their balance standing on one foot. This is relevant for low energy construction and robotics. 3) using prairie dogs as models for viral infections that normal lab animals are not susceptible to (small pox). This was presented by the chief of the pox virus and rabies branch from the CDC. 4) a session on making physiological models using 2 liter soda bottles. My favorite was the nephron.