Clemens Riegler (front), project leader and post-doctoral supervisor, oversees Francis K. Masuda ‘15 (back) as he conducts statistical analysis on the activity of zebra-fish neurons in Life Sciences 100r.

Last spring, while her peers were sitting through Life Science lectures and replicating ages-old science experiments in lab, Valentina Lyau ’15 was learning a little differently. Ten minutes down Oxford Street, Lyau swiped into the restricted-access facilities of Northwest Laboratories to construct a virtual reality as part of a research seminar called Life Sciences 100r.

LS100r is an undergraduate class through which students gain course credit for participating in hands-on research for a semester.

For her research, Lyau aided a graduate student constructing a virtual reality environment for zebra fish to measure neuron activity in response to stimuli.

“It was basically like the movie ‘The Matrix,’” says LS100r professor Alain Viel, who is also the director of the Northwest Laboratories. Viel has directed the course since it was first offered in 2004.

As a fundamental part of the course, undergraduates work with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, known as “project leaders,” who guide them in their experimentation.

In addition to lab work, students are required to attend weekly meetings, and give three presentations over the course of the semester updating the class on their progress. At the end of the course, the students deliver a public presentation of their semester’s results.

When LS100r was conceived—then as Molecular and Cellular Biology 100r—it was the first research-based course offered for credit at the College. In the time since then, the Life Sciences has created specialized research-based classes, allowing many students to pursue research for credit in labs around the University. But LS100r remains the sole class readily available to undergraduates of all concentrations and all levels of experience.

MAKING TERM-TIME RESEARCH POSSIBLE

Robert A. Lue, head of Life Sciences Education, was part of the team that got MCB100r off the ground 10 years ago. At the time, he was serving as the executive director of undergraduate education in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the course was the first at the College to offer class credit for Life Sciences research.

“I knew of no other school that was dedicated to creating a class like that,” Lue says of LS100r. The for-credit class replicated a professional research environment, in which students engaged in projects that appealed to them and worked on a self-determined schedule.

Undergraduate research had been ingrained in the University for years prior to 2004, but LS100r represented the first class to award students course credit for independent research. Following LS100r’s creation and quickly escalating popularity, other concentrations have integrated similar research seminars into their course catalogue, like Chemistry 99 and Psychology 910r.

For many students, offering course credit makes research during the semester a more viable commitment.

One student planning to take advantage of these research opportunities is Doug G. Evans ’15, who intends to enroll in Chemistry 99 next fall in order to invest time in his research without sacrificing from his other schoolwork. This semester, he says, his course load makes it difficult to spend enough time in lab.

“The fact that I will get credit for working in my own lab will definitely be a plus,” Evans says.

Kyle G. Krueger ’14, an applied math concentrator pursuing a psychology secondary, says she enjoys the chance to integrate research into her course load without detracting from her concentration. She is taking Psychology 910r in the process of fulfilling her secondary and says that Harvard’s practice of offering research courses for credit makes it easier for her to engage in the field.