Mary Peek Academic Professional Office: Boggs 2-14 Phone: 404-894-4001 Fax: 404-894-7452 Peek Teaching Homepage E-mail Mary Peek

B.A., Hollins College, 1990; Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1995; Postdoctoral Fellow, Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1995-1997

 

Responsibilities:

Mary primarily serves as the Coordinator and Instructor for the undergraduate biochemistry laboratory courses and graduate/undergraduate seminar courses (CHEM 4581, 4582, 4601, 4681, 8902, 8903). She is continually engaged in the development and/or enhancement of laboratory experiments and training of graduate teaching assistants. In the Fall 2005 term, she will pilot a semester of technical training in biochemical methodology for select graduate teaching assistants who will then serve as TA's for the Spring 2006 term. Mary will also begin to serve on the General Faculty and continue to serve on the Undergraduate Committee. Her responsibilities have recently expanded to include academic advising for undergraduate chemistry majors.

Teaching Interests:

Mary's teaching philosophy is summed up in the statement "I have not taught until students have learned". She delights in engaging students in an effort to increase student understanding and to encourage creative thinking in the biochemistry laboratory. Her broad teaching objective is to create a learning environment where students can (1) think critically and creatively about experimental science, (2) develop skills that will serve as a solid foundation in biochemistry-related careers, and (3) enhance their communication skills.

One tool that Mary has used widely in her laboratory courses is problem-based learning (PBL). In Biochemistry Laboratory I (CHEM 4581), student groups of 2 or 3 are given a specific experimental problem that they must come to understand and solve within one 6-hour laboratory session. Students must research the problem theoretically in order to understand its premise. Then, they must formulate a hypothesis, design experiments to directly test that hypothesis and actually perform the experimentation. At the end of the term, students work together in their groups to compose an ~15-page laboratory report and give a 45-minute presentation on their results to their peers. The subsequent course, Biochemistry Laboratory II (CHEM 4582), builds on this theme. In CHEM 4582, students identify a biochemical problem of interest their own interest, propose a hypothesis, design experiments to test that hypothesis and perform the experiments independently over the course of a minimum of five 5-hour laboratory sessions. Again, at the end of the term, the students write an ~15-page laboratory report in the style of an original research article and give a 45-minute presentation of the work.

The ability to effectively communicate scientific ideas orally and in writing to different kinds of groups (diverse audiences, experts in the field, and novices) is critical to success in scientific careers. When Mary joined our department in 2000, she developed the undergraduate Chemistry Seminar (CHEM 4601), which is exclusively taken by biochemistry-track chemistry majors. In this course, undergraduates learn the basics of giving oral scientific presentations and gain substantial practice in participating in rigorous discussions about contemporary biochemical research. In the Fall 2005 term, Mary will lead the Graduate Seminar (CHEM 8903) - an analogous course that mimics a seminar series in which graduate students who have completed their literature examinations must give a departmental presentation on a recent advancement in their field that is distinct from the student's specific thesis topic.

Scholarship:

Presentation: "Enhancing Undergraduate Education Using Optical Spectroscopy" at the 55th Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society. November 16-19, 2003; Atlanta, GA

Workshop: Development of a Problem-Based Biochemistry Laboratory Curriculum at "PBL 2002: An International Conference on Problem-Based Learning in Higher Education". June 16-20, 2002; Baltimore, MD

Peek, M. E. and Williams, L. D. "X-ray Crystallography of DNA-Drug Complexes" Methods in Enzymology 340, 282-290 (2001).

Synergistic Activities:

Mary has earned more than $112,000 in funding for equipment for the Biochemistry Teaching Laboratory through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Georgia Tech Technology Fee Funds. For two years she directed an undergraduate research project on crystallization of DNA dodecamers in space, in collaboration with Professor Loren Williams, the Center for Biophysical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Alabama Birmingham, and NASA. In the summers of 2001 and 2002, she coordinated and led the crystallography laboratory sessions for the Molecular Genetics and Protein Structure/Function workshop of the Centers for Workshops in the Chemical Sciences (CWCS).