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Building the North Bay: What's on the horizon?
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, 8-11:30 a.m., Hyatt Vineyard Creek, Santa Rosa

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Dominican opens science center

$20 MILLION FACILITY SUPPORTS RESEARCH BY UNDERGRADUATES

SAN RAFAEL – Dominican University of California opened a new $20 million science center this month to support its growing undergraduate research programs.

The 35,000-square-foot building will help the university offer opportunities for undergraduates to pursue research more typically found at the graduate level, said Dr. Joseph Fink, president of the university.

“It’s really a program to train people who are going into the work force in the North Bay, whether they’re going into the biotech or high-tech world, whether they’re going to be K-12 science or math teachers or nurses,” Dr. Fink said.

Dominican has grown its natural sciences and mathematics department from 30 students to 130 students in about five years, and the university has hired several new science professors to broaden its research capabilities.

“They’ve brought with them their own networking, their own grants and their own research,” Dr. Fink said of the new professors. “They’ve brought with them the philosophy that students would get involved with research not at the graduate level but at the undergraduate level.”

Working with mouse stem cells

Among the new professors is Dr. Mohammed El Majdoubi, who joined the university two years ago after serving as the director of the Cell Imaging Core at UC San Francisco’s Center for Reproductive Sciences. Dr. Majdoubi uses mouse embryonic stem cells to study the development of hormone-secreting cells in the brain and has been granted privileges to expand his research using human embryonic stem cells at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato.

Dr. Majdoubi hopes that his students will eventually have access to the human stem-cell research but says they must first train extensively with the mouse cells, which are easier to work with and far less expensive.

The new science center, which houses seven research laboratories and nine teaching labs, will help accelerate that training by making it easier for students to gain hands-on experience.

“Most students will have the instruments and space to work on their own projects,” Dr. Majdoubi said. “This is a big addition and will definitely contribute a lot to making the training feasible, something that will work, something that would have an impact.”

Each research group will now have its own lab, replacing a single lab that was shared by eight different professors and their students, Dr. Majdoubi said.

Up to this point, “we basically had one student doing the experiment and the rest were watching,” Dr. Majdoubi said.

Other faculty researchers and their students are studying breast cancer, sudden oak death, biofuels and the genetics of alcohol addiction, among other topics. Dr. Fink said it is rare for undergraduates to conduct such advanced research, which is becoming a niche for Dominican.

“By getting students involved in research freshman year, it makes them much more competitive and much more confident when it’s time for them to go into medical school and graduate schools,” Dr. Fink said.

Students, Dr. Fink said, are already taking notice of the university’s transformation.

“We get more students now from Southern California than we do from Northern California because the word is out about what we do,” Dr. Fink said.

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