CYNTHIA BURROWS

After serving as chair from 2013 - 2019 and spending a year on sabbatical, I returned to active classroom teaching in F2020.  For the following 3 years, I accepted the challenge of teaching undergraduate Biochemistry 1 (Chem 3510), initially in parallel with my colleague Prof. Vahe Bandarian.  In 2020, we worked to move the course online because of covid; specifically, Prof. Bandarian recorded online lectures and developed online quizzes while I worked on Zoom-based discussion sections in which students split into smaller rooms to work on weekly problem sets that I developed.  This mechanism was transitioned back to the classroom in F2021 and F2022.  The following academic year, I developed a new interdisciplinary course entitled "Chemistry of the Origins of Life," (Chem 7580).  This course began with astronomy and planetary geology and then moved to prebiotic synthesis of biological building blocks such as nucleoside, amino acids, and key metabolites.  RNA chemistry and protocells figured heavily in the course to eventually define LUCA, the last universal common ancester.  The initial concept of this course was as a capstone course for undergraduate students in the College of Science; the principal demographic so far has been first-year graduate student. This course was taught in Spring A 2024 and 2025.  In Spring 2026, I return to teaching Nucleic Acid Chemistry (Chem 5470/7470), a course I developed 25 years ago in recognition of the explosion of interest in DNA and RNA chemistry.  New updates in the field make this topic more exciting than ever.