Dr. Greg Buhrman - First Time Teacher
By Greg Buhrman
OK, I admit I was getting a little desperate today. I’d started this class with the idea of teaching Cell Biology and along the way, explaining how normal cellular biology relates to the disease state, with a focus on cancer and diabetes. When I started organizing the class it made sense at the time. After all, I’ve spent the last ten years doing cancer research, mostly with Dr. Carla Mattos (my thesis mentor) and Dr. Jason Haugh (a committee member and collaborator in the Chemical Engineering Department) at NCSU and for a year or two (one year in his lab, two years if you count collaboration time) with Dr. Johannes Rudolph at Duke Univ. With that experience, I felt like I had a reasonable handle on enough aspects of cancer research to teach it. Diabetes is a disease that I’m just starting to work on now in Dr. Bob Rose’s lab at NCSU, so I felt like if I’m going to be learning about it anyway, I might as well incorporate it in the class.