Lindsay France/University Photography

Biomedical engineering professor and faculty-in-residence Chris Schaffer hosts a lemonade stand for students arriving at Mary Donlon Hall on Move-In Day, Aug. 22.

They’ve shared a home in Ithaca and a research lab in Weill Hall, and now biomedical engineering associate professor Chris Schaffer and assistant professor Nozomi Nishimura will share an apartment in Mary Donlon Hall with their two dogs, Ace and Cala. Together they’ll get to know new students over the next three years.

Schaffer is the new faculty-in-residence (FIR) at Donlon, and Nishimura is a faculty fellow in residence. The FIR program promotes intellectual engagement in students’ daily lives.

“The backbone of this is one-on-one, informal mentoring of students,” Schaffer says. “We can sit down and chat, discuss potential career paths and majors. We’ll also bring in colleagues and guest speakers and have them join us for dinner; people who can provide advice and serve as role models.”

Both will teach courses for freshmen as part of Learning Where You Live, a new initiative of one- and two-credit, pass/fail courses in living-and-learning environments on North and West campuses. The courses range from science topics (ornithology, sustainability, viruses) to popular music, service learning, and race, class and gender at Cornell.

Nishimura

“In this context Cornell is building a basis for lifelong learning,” Nishimura says. “You’re surrounded by people who are the best in their fields, and they have broad interests.”

Schaffer’s spring course, “Seeing Science in Action,” features a lab module and lectures “with the 30,000-foot view of science.” Introductory STEM courses often teach science as a collection of static facts in a book, he says, “but it’s not what science is – science is a creative and collaborative process of discovery.” Students often don’t begin to see that aspect, if at all, “until very late in their education,” Schaffer says.

After a big-picture introductory lecture, freshmen in the class will be assigned “to shadow a postdoc or graduate student for a couple of days as they conduct experiments.” Later, the students will gather with graduate students, postdocs and the principal investigator to discuss experiments they saw and how they relate to the lab’s research goals.

Nishimura is teaching “Edible Engineering and Sautéed Science” this fall, using the kitchen in Donlon to explore food and its production, apply critical thinking and conduct systematic experiments with a little biochemistry and physics on the side.

“The goal is to break down something that’s familiar and think about it from all different angles,” she says.

The pair has “worked in science labs for 17 of our 18 years together. It’s been a positive experience,” Schaffer says. “Cornell is a uniquely collaborative place. Nozomi and I run a relatively large research group [10 Ph.D. students, 24 undergraduate researchers], and we don’t have a single project that doesn’t involve a collaboration.”

A competitive application process for FIRs begins two years before current faculty appointments at North Campus residences end. Before their terms in residence, new FIRs first serve a year as a faculty fellow. Applicants are asked to detail “programming and events you envision,” Schaffer says.

Schaffer recently spent a one-year sabbatical working as a science policy fellow for U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and is starting up an informal “‘Policy and Politics Today’ get-together to encourage students to be thoughtful and active and understand how public policy works.”

Nishimura says she is interested in “making Donlon a very supportive environment, with tutoring and ‘study jams.’ There’s a lot of data that suggests that having students work in groups and learn together helps with retention of knowledge and concepts, and with sticking it out in difficult fields.”

“The students we have met through teaching and the lab have really been engaged and creative; actually a really fine group of students – and we can take on 500 of them,” she says.