The Council on Undergraduate Research awarded Professor Anne Casper, a biology professor at Eastern Michigan University, a national honorable mention for mentorship.
The CUR only gave one award and two honorable mentions this year for the category of teachers who have six or fewer years of experience for superior mentorship of undergraduate students in research. Casper has mentored 22 students from the undergraduate and graduate biology programs at EMU in the last six years.
When she submitted her application, Casper was fairly confident in herself, a characteristic she has instilled in her students.
“There are a lot of wonderful biology professors out there doing great work with undergraduates,” Casper said. “But, I did think that I would be able to put together a strong application, so I certainly hoped for the best when I applied.”
Biology major Kayleigh Watson, a former undergraduate researcher in Casper’s lab for two years, was ecstatic when Casper asked her to write a letter of recommendation for her.
“I was totally honored to have the chance to tell the committee what an incredible person and mentor Dr. Casper is,” Watson said. “She’s just so incredibly bright and driven and deserving that I naturally figured that the committee would see that.”
The CUR promotes undergraduate student-faculty joint research, and has members from more than 650 colleges and universities. The requirements for nominations include a resume and three letters of recommendation, one from a colleague and two from undergraduate students. The competition was judged by some of the country’s leading biologists.
Biology lab work is detail-oriented, solutions have to be mixed and equipment has to be operated carefully. Some students can have difficulties getting comfortable in such an environment.
“Before my time in the Casper lab, I didn’t have any lab experience outside of the classroom setting,” said Quinn Ellison, a member of Casper’s lab for two years. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I learned all kinds of techniques that I’m now applying to my research rotations in a Ph.D. program.”
Casper’s “labbies,” as she affectionately calls them, are never working alone. Casper makes sure that her students get the attention that they need to achieve success.
“My approach is that the lab is a team. All of the Casper labbies are working together toward common goals, and so we’re here to support and encourage each other,” Casper said.
In a field where experiments often fail and tests are hard, Casper never lets her students lose faith. Ellison and Watson agreed that the work was unquestionably difficult, but it was made much easier by Casper’s hands-on interaction and her dedication to her students.
“Dr. Casper has this way of holding you to really high standards without making you feel pressured or stressed out about doing something,” Ellison said. “There were many times I went into her office feeling fairly overwhelmed . . . and before I even had time to think about it, she had convinced me both that I was going to do it and that it wasn’t going to be a problem.”
Coupled with her honorable mention, Casper won her second grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for $332,000. This brings her total awarded grants to $763,500. This is going toward her research of yeast DNA.
“The reagents that we need for research in molecular genetics are very expensive . . . Without the grant, I would not be able to support and mentor the research of so many students in the lab,” Casper said.
Casper is studying genomic instability in yeast cells to better understand genetic changes, such as mutations, and how they can develop in certain tumor cells.
With her honorable mention and her new grant, Dr. Casper will be able to continue her work in the laboratory for some time to come, helping to change the lives of her students and teaching them how to conduct research.
“She has always been the person I look up to most in my life and her dedication truly inspires me to keep going, keep my head up, and keep asking the tough questions of the world around me,” Watson said. “After all, the answers are out there, it just takes tough, ambitious, determined people like Dr. Casper to relentlessly search for them.”
