Diversity at Trinity--From The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education
Diversity at Trinity--From The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education |
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| The following article appeared in The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, June 6, 2000. |
Trinity's Inventive Hebe Guardiola-DiazDiscovering biochemistry in everyday life
"When we’re talking about enzymatic activity, I show students the molecular structure of AZT and explain that by inhibiting enzymatic activity AZT is able, at some level, to help AIDS patients," she explains. "Enzyme kinetics can be very cut-and-dry and very mathematical. Or, you can provide reasons why students should care about the understanding of molecular structure." Guardiola-Diaz teaches biochemistry and neurobiology in the biology department and in the neuroscience program. A Trinity faculty member for a year, she already has earned a reputation as a passionate and challenging teacher. It is a passion that she believes everyone should embrace. "How can you not care about life?" she asks. "We’ve all had headaches. We’ve all had the fear of getting an incurable disease. We all care about genetic diseases, especially young people who are thinking about starting families. How can you understand mental illness without understanding the biochemistry of the nervous system?"
Rooted in science A native of Puerto Rico, Guardiola-Diaz’s interest in science and medicine is one that she shares with many other family members. She earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico, then spent a summer doing research at the gerontology division of the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) in Paris. She earned her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Michigan, before doing a post-doctoral fellowship in the biochemistry of nuclear receptors at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden’s leading institution for medical education and research. Before coming to Trinity, she served as an instructor in biology at the University of Michigan. In her research, she is currently examining a family of proteins that reside in the nucleus of cells in the nervous system and that, when activated, control gene expression. An article based on related research into how cold affects an organism’s production of fat cells was recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.  Says Professor of Psychology Priscilla
Kehoe, who directs Trinity’s neuroscience program, "Dr. Guardiola-Diaz is an
excellent teacher with serious concern for her students’ welfare and their
advancement in scientific thinking. Her scholarly research adds another level of analysis
to our diverse program. In the "Neuroscience Methods" course, her students have
had the opportunity to examine cells of the nervous system called
‘oligodendrocytes’ that cover certain neurons and are the very cells that, when
missing, cause diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. The students were able to learn to
utilize techniques that allow the growth of these cells in order to study their
maturation. For Trinity students this is a unique opportunity to learn modern
molecular neurobiological techniques as well as participate in cutting-edge
research." (Guardiola-Diaz is seen above with Trinity student Toni A. Finney '00.)
Last summer, Guardiola-Diaz and Professor of Chemistry David E. Henderson conducted an innovative phytoremediation project in which students created an experimental garden in a lead-contaminated vacant lot in Hartford. Their goal was to remove the toxins from the soil and reclaim the area for the neighborhood residents. Says Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology and department chair Craig W. Schneider, "Hebe’s full of new ideas and a bundle of energy." The six undergraduate students and their two professors announced in February that the special breed of Indian mustard they planted at the lot reduced lead from levels in excess of 1,000 parts per million (ppm) to fewer than 500 ppm. The allowable level for soil that is to be used for residential or agricultural purposes is 500 ppm. "The garden was an important demonstration because it shows that a poor neighborhood with limited resources can tackle environmental problems," said Diaz. "The project appealed to our students who are very interested in the environment and very interested in doing something to improve the quality of life in Hartford."The student research was supported with funds Trinity received under a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and was conducted in association with a New Jersey-based biotechnology company that provided seeds and expertise for the project as part of its effort to explore the possible commercialization of the process known as phytoremediation, or the use of plants to remove pollutants from the environment or to render them harmless. Phytoremediation promises potentially huge environmental and financial rewards because the use of plants poses a simple, safe, and cost-effective approach to the remediation of soils and water. The federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there are more than 30,000 sites requiring hazardous waste treatment services throughout the United States. Lead contamination represents a particularly difficult problem because there are no permanent, low-cost solutions for heavy metal contamination. The idea for the research garden originated with Guardiola-Diaz and another Trinity professor, David E. Henderson, who were interested in creating summer projects for their students. Guardiola-Diaz and Henderson, a professor of chemistry, independently approached college administrators for ideas. Each professor was unaware of the other’s effort until administrators got them together. "It was just great timing," said Guardiola-Diaz, explaining that she got the idea for the project when she and a neighbor who works for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection met at a housewarming party and began to talk about ways in which they could collaborate and help the City of Hartford. Henderson, meanwhile, was looking for a project that would allow the chemistry department to use a newly acquired piece of equipment known as an inductively coupled plasma emissions spectrometer. The tool is used in trace metal analysis. "Hebe said, ‘Let’s do this together.’ And I said, ‘OK, fine.’ But I had no idea what this project was going to do to my schedule!" said Henderson. The College agreed to finance the project, giving the professors $37,000 from its Kellogg Community Innovation Fund to hire students and purchase supplies. The fund was established in May 1998 when the Kellogg Foundation awarded Trinity a $5.1-million grant to support Trinity’s strategic commitment to building academic- community connections that emphasize civic responsibility and educational innovation. The lot selected for the garden project totals 1.2 acres and is adjacent to the House of Bread, a non-profit that operates a soup kitchen and temporary housing for the homeless on Chestnut and Edwards streets in Hartford . It is also across the street from the city’s Quirk Middle School and within a short distance of the gold-domed state Capitol. The lot had formerly been the site of a paint store, accounting for the high levels of lead contamination in the soil. When the old paint store building was leveled several years ago, the debris was buried at the site, further contributing to the pollution problem. The lot is owned by the City of Hartford, which had leased it to the Hartford-based Knox Foundation for use as a community garden. The foundation intended to create a community garden as it has done at 16 other locations in Hartford, but it was prohibited from going ahead with its plans once the pollution was discovered. Up until then, neighborhood children also had been allowed to play in the vacant lot. Working with city and state officials, the two Trinity professors became involved, suggesting the site as the location for their remediation project. Guardiola-Diaz also involved EdenSpace, the biotechnology company based in Monmouth Junction, NJ, that provided seeds and valuable expertise for the research project. The company has tried its phytoremediation methods with some success in New Jersey, Ohio, Massachusetts, and near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine.
"We used an electron microscope to look at the cells of the plants to see what happened and to test the amount of lead they absorbed," Guardiola-Diaz said. Now that the lot has been cleaned, the House of Bread will plant a vegetable garden on the lot this spring. Meanwhile, Trinity and its students are studying other contaminated lots in the city as they look for a new location to plant their next experimental garden. "This has been a great way to get our students learning and involved in the community," Guardiola-Diaz said. "The students have made presentations and they talk to neighbors who stop by the garden. It’s been a really rich experience of being involved in the community, helping out our neighbors, and learning. To a large extent, that is what we were after."
Problem-based learning
Neuroscience major Julie A. Plagenhoef ’00, who is currently taking biochemistry with Guardiola-Diaz, says her professor’s approach is very effective. "One of the things that’s difficult to do in the hard sciences is to relate what you’re learning to the outside world," Plagenhoef notes. "But Professor Guardiola-Diaz gives us practice problems that could happen in our own lives." Since her junior year, Plagenhoef has worked as a research assistant to Guardiola-Diaz. She believes the experience will help advance her plans to attend graduate school and earn a degree in public health. Says Isaac Bohannon ’00, a biology major who’s taken biochemistry with Guardiola-Diaz, "Professor Guardiola-Diaz wants students to think for themselves. In biochemistry lab, we designed our own experiments using the scientific literature and techniques we learned at the beginning of the semester. Doing experiments that way took longer than if we had all the steps outlined for us, but I got so much more out of it." Guardiola-Diaz hopes that her students will come to share her enthusiasm for her subject. "Biochemistry is the study of the molecules that do the wonderful things that we define as life," says Guardiola-Diaz. "It’s very intellectually satisfying and a lot of fun to engage my students as they make this discovery." Andrea Comer and Suzanne Zack |
AZT, or zidovudine, is regarded as
one of the most effective weapons against AIDS. But to Assistant Professor of Biology Hebe
M. Guardiola-Diaz, the antiviral drug is equally valuable for its ability to illustrate
biochemistry in a very compelling way. 
The garden was planted in June after much difficult labor. Henderson and the
students had to use 12-pound sledge-hammers to break up old foundations and bricks so that
a garden could b planted. The soil was so difficult to work with that the garden was
limited in size to 60-feet by 8—feet (photo on right, project at week 1). But once
planted, the garden did well and the first harvest was completed in mid-July (photo below
right, project at week 6).
A second planting was made and harvested in August. The harvested
plants included the roots, since the students and professors weren’t sure which part
of the plants best absorbed the lead. After testing and analysis, the plants were burned
and the ash was disposed of as hazardous waste.
Guardiola-Diaz
tries to make her students care about what they’re learning by making science
relevant to them (at right, Rebecca Thibault '01 and Phillip W. Thompson '01 join
Guardiola-Diaz in lab). Employing "problem-based learning" in her classes, she
presents students with problems that relate to real-life situations. In a recent class,
students considered the case of an unemployed man who was admitted to the emergency room
in a coma, with alcohol on his breath. Students were given the results of a blood sample
analysis -- including alcohol, blood glucose, lactate, and pH levels -- and told that
after hemodialysis was started, the man’s blood alcohol level fell, he regained
consciousness, and he was released from the hospital two days later. Students were
challenged to explain, based on the clinical evidence, what had actually happened to the
man.