Tag: John Brubacher

Faculty: In Their Own Words – Dr. John Brubacher

Post author By CMU
Post date August 19, 2016

Dr. John Brubacher, Assistant Professor of Biology, has worked at CMU since 2008.

What do you love about your work here?

One of the things I appreciate is that at CMU, we have our four commitments: Educate for Peace – Justice; Learn through Thinking and Doing; Welcome Generous Hospitality… Radical Dialogue; and Model Invitational Community. To work at a place that’s seriously trying to make those sorts of things the undergirding aspect of an education is exciting.

What are you excited about teaching in the coming school year?

This winter I’m teaching a course called The Genetic Revolution. I’ll guide students through a series of the greatest experiments in the history of genetics. I’m excited because I’ll be teaching it in historical progression, with the idea being that it will help give students some insights into not just what we know about genes and how they work in organisms, but how we figured it out.

What are you researching and writing right now?

I’m researching little flatworms that are called planarians. You can take one and chop it into 100 pieces, and each piece can regenerate and remodel itself to form an intact worm. That allows us to start asking all sorts of questions about how these flatworms – and animals generally – develop and heal. I’m working with colleagues at the Morgridge Institute for Research in Wisconsin, and I’m helping them with a micro anatomical study of the worms to understand how the cells are arranged in a normal worm, and then how they behave when you cut a piece off the worm. The cells need to migrate around – they need to differentiate and specialize to become different types of cells, and we still have a lot to learn about the basics of cell behaviour in that process.

What are you reading for enjoyment?

I like a little mindless mystery every now and then, so I picked up a commemorative set of four famous mysteries by Agatha Christie featuring one of her most famous characters, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. I just started Murder on the Orient Express. But these days, I’m mostly reading for school and watching the Olympics.

Where or how do students give you hope?

There’s a sense of generosity to our students that gives me hope. One thing that exemplifies what I’m thinking of is that every November, students celebrate Tuition Freedom Day, which marks the end of the fiscal year paid for by student tuition, and the beginning of the year made possible by grants and donations from the Manitoba government, churches, and individual donors. Students host a big festival to celebrate the importance of donor and government funding just to keep this place operational. That’s really powerful.

What saying or motto inspires you?

For my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, an aunt of mine cross-stitched them a wall hanging of Micah 6:8: “What does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” I grew up with that on the wall and that’s always been one of those things to aim for.

Tags CMU, Faculty, faculty interviews, In Their Own Words, In Their Words, John Brubacher, planarians, Science, tuition freedom day

General News News Releases

Dr. John Brubacher’s speech from Science Lab opening

Post author By CMU
Post date September 3, 2010

University science departments today face many challenges, not least the call to teach more students with fewer staff, and less money. As
a result, the pressure is on to cut costs and make efficient use of time…and laboratory components of classes represent some of the more
expensive and labour-intensive aspects of science education. Since my days as an undergraduate student, there has been a gradual trend
– to reduce the number of laboratory classes in a semester, or to drop lab components of courses and replace them with problem sets, more
lectures, or more recently virtual, computer-based labs.
This trend is disturbing, for two reasons (well, more than two, but time is limited).
First, it deprives students of the opportunity to actually do science. Imagine if music performance majors didn’t play instruments or sing
until their senior year, or if athletes trained without playing their sport, until they registered in “Basketball 495, Senior Practicum”. Of
course, those would be rather absurd situations, but as an analogy of how science programs are typically structured, increasingly it’s not far
off.* Of course, history and theory have their place in science education, but they can’t be everything. Because doing science is very much an
art – there are manual skills involved in manipulating equipment, skills of intuition needed to frame an interesting question, and formulate
and test hypotheses to attempt to answer it, skills of flexibility and patience to work with and explain the often ambiguous, messy results of
real-world experiments…
If we want to produce insightful, creative scientists, or professionals in science-based fields like medicine, engineering, or even a citizenry
that can truly be described as scientifically literate, we need to give our students the opportunity to practice doing science. That’s what this
lab is for.
Second, beyond just gaining skill in scientific investigation, there are less-tangible benefits to laboratory education that are difficult for
students to replicate by reading a textbook or listening to a lecture. My job, as a biology teacher, is to invite my students to fall in love with
biology as a field of study. That can be done via lectures, yes, but there’s something much more alluring about science when one has the op-
portunity to actually try their hand at it.
My father taught chemistry at the University of Waterloo for over 30 years. I once asked him why he chose to go into chemistry in the first
place. His answer was that more than anything else, it was the vivid colours and strange smells of chemical solutions that drew him in.
A few years ago, I found my PhD advisor, on a particularly stressful, no-good, very bad day, sitting at the microscope looking at grasshopper
ovaries, which had little to do with anything that needed doing at the time. He just looked up at me and said, “I decided I needed to look at
beautiful things for a while,”. Doing science is a sensory experience, and in many ways, a return to being a kid and being thrilled at discov-
ering how something is put together, or how one thing leads to another.
This fall, students in my introductory biology class will meet a species of bacterium that infects plants, and actually genetically engineers its
host, forcing the plant to provide food and shelter. Later in the term, they will bring in food or other household items, and test them for their
tendency to cause mutations in bacteria, and most likely be stunned, fascinated, and perhaps disturbed by what they discover. And just
maybe, they’ll start to fall in love.
That course is just one among seven that will use this facility this school year. It’s a small facility, but it’s a good one, and it allows my col-
leagues and I to develop curricula that will give our students opportunities they would not have in similar courses at other institutions.
That’s why this laboratory is so important, and that is why I want to say a big thank-you to two levels of government, and a number of
donors – the Duecks in particular – for your support in making this kind of education possible. I hope and pray that this facility, and those
of us who work in it, will be worthy of the faith and goodwill you have shown us.
* Lindgren, Clark (2010) “Teaching by doing: turning a biology curriculum upside down.” Skeptic 15(4):35-37.
September 3, 2010
John Brubacher, Professor of Biology, gave a speech at the opening of CMU’s new Science Lab: