The photograph of the living urchin at the top of the Urchin Workshop home page is from the Department of Biology at Loyola University of Chicago.
The sea urchin SEM photomicrographs were obtained by participants in the Summer 2004 Workshops, who were: Casey Kennedy, Ryan Adams, Sagan Sherlin, Kelli Wiedmaier, Ashlie Alexander, Joshua Ruble, Conerd Frederickson, Sarabeth Bailey, Mason Breed, Austin Plumlee, Jacob Sawrie, Rachel Roisen, Kate Davis, Ashley Thomas, Michael Deyo, Brandon Walser, Sarah McCay, Heith Wylie, and Robert Clark.
Instructional staff for the 2004 Summer Workshops included Dr. Carl Frederickson, Dr. James Murray, Dr. Paul Hamilton, and project assistant Jason Fechter. |
During Summer 2004, two week-long workshops were held at the University of Central Arkansas for the purpose of teaching high school students and UCA science majors the basic skills of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The students were grouped into pairs, consisting of one high school student and one UCA science major, an arrangement patterned after the Breakthrough Collaborative. Each student pair studied a different feature of the anatomy of the sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus. A sea urchin was chosen because of the extensive base of existing developmental biology data, and Lytechinus variegatus was chosen, in part, because it is one of the organisms for which the entire genome is being sequenced (at the Human Genome Sequencing Center of the Baylor College of Medicine). During the workshops the students also researched published information on relevant aspects of sea urchin biology, and at the end of each workshop, each student team presented a poster describing their project for other workshop participants and UCA science faculty. 
