Marcia Cordts, Ph.D.
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1988 |
Lecturer Campus address: 3-610 BSB Mailing address: 51 Newton Rd. 3-610 Bowen Science Building Iowa City, IA 52242 Phone: 319-335-7777 Email: |
Ever since I arrived at the University of Iowa in 1997, I have been fortunate to be able to direct all my energies towards microbiology education. My primary interest has been to develop and implement the most effective instructional methods at all parts of the learning process, starting with diverse strategies to initially engage the student, then facilitating concept integration into a workable knowledge base in each student’s brain, and ultimately assessing students’ meaningful learning. A major accomplishment has been the extensive manuals that I have written for microbiology laboratories in Principles of Infectious Diseases and General Microbiology. Each semester I’ve strived to increasingly put the students who use these manuals into situations in which they are required to think for themselves — the challenge at the heart of real learning.
Currently, my main teaching responsiblities consist of the courses General Microbiology (both lecture and laboratory components) and Dental Microbiology. In General Microbiology, I am turning the course more towards “Just-In-Time Learning”, such that students have to take more responsibility for reading in advance of class in order that we may devote our precious in-class hours to discussion and problem-solving. For Dental Microbiology, I have developed a simple activity in which students identify an unknown member of the human oral flora based on a gene search at the Human Oral Microbiome Database.
My scientific training began at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri from which I graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1982. I was awarded my Ph.D. in microbiology from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) in 1988 working in the laboratory of Dr. Jane Gibson with the beautiful purple non-sulfur bacterium, Rhodopseudomonas sphaeroides. After completing my doctorate I taught at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) then returned to Cornell as a lecturer in microbiology. I’m very proud of the EDUCOM/NCRIPTAL Best Biology Higher Education Software award that I won in 1989 (together with my coauthors, Ron Beloin and Jane Gibson) for our nationally recognized software, “A Tutorial in Recombinant DNA Technology”. Constructed mainly on a 512-K Mac, the philosophy behind this pioneering piece of educational software continues to resonate through my teaching today: use humor, good images, and interesting examples to activate the students’ desire to learn; demonstrate to the students that the ownership of the learning process lies in their hands; and provide frequent feedback to help the students’ gauge the progress they have made. Enforcing these high level learning demands while keeping abreast with a field as dynamic and diverse as microbiology provides an ongoing personal challenge to me.