A unique new course blending both modern stem cell experiments and community outreach with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease had Sarah Dugal ’25 looking forward to class this semester.
“I was very excited about the fact that it’s not a lecture-focused course,” she says. “It’s not something you get in a lot of these kinds of classes. It’s a very hands-on experience.”
The undergraduate class, Modeling Human Disease Using Stem Cells, is a distinct offering in Brown’s Division of Biology and Medicine. Students gain firsthand experience with manipulating human stem cells through their own experiments, while also participating in community outreach with clinicians, caregivers, and patients.
As a Collaborative Research and Scholarly Experiences-designated course, it is designed to make both research and scholarly experiences more accessible to students. Chuck Toth, PhD, director of the Multi-Disciplinary Laboratories in the Office of Biology Undergraduate Education and the course’s instructor, says his class is built on his experiences teaching biology at Providence College, where he also integrated stem cell biology into an undergraduate curriculum.
“It’s important that each of them are doing their own unique projects,” Toth says. “Some are studying calcium, some are studying cholesterol metabolism, and some are studying inflammation.”
The course also has the distinction of being the only Community-Based Learning and Research course in the division, thanks to a partnership with the Butler Hospital Memory and Aging Program, he says.
While the projects coalesce around researching Alzheimer’s disease, Toth says the 15 students in the inaugural class have the freedom to independently develop their own research projects. Throughout the semester, students learn how to culture and maintain pluripotent stem cells lines, learn the fundamentals of gene expression and protein marker analyses, and participate in a scientific poster session.
Outside of the lab, students meet one-on-one with Alzheimer’s caregivers and patients, as well as staff at Butler Hospital, to learn how the disease impacts society and better understand the impact of their research. They also participated in community events during International Brain Week, like the 2025 Brown Brain Fair, in what Toth calls a bench-to-bedside training experience.
“It’s easy to be in a lab and focus on yourselves and your projects to get results, but taking that and understanding what Alzheimer’s actually does to a patient and a caregiver is important,” he says.
The mix of research and outreach contributes greatly to students’ confidence and reinforces the ownership aspect of his class.
“You can see that sort of excitement on their face, when their cells are doing well and the project is progressing,” he says.
Jennesse Alejandro ’25 was interested in the research and collaborative aspect of the class and says the interactions with clinicians and attendees at events like the Brown Brain Fair were beneficial.
“Meeting with patients and family members to speak with them about Alzheimer’s and our research was also a testament to how much of an understanding we have of the disease since we first started,” Alejandro says.
Melany Veliz ’25 found learning everything from cell culture techniques to community outreach to be a major boost for both her academic and career aspirations.
“As an undergraduate, this kind of course is extremely rare,” she says. “This will take us very far in our professional careers, and I’m hopefully going to aim for a research position after I graduate.”