ANDRZEJ KRAUZENicole Haggerty carefully floated wax paper on the water in her dorm room toilet, then sat down to do her business. Once she was finished, the University of Michigan freshman used a small plastic scoop to sample a teaspoon of her feces and placed the scoop in a tube filled with a solution that removed any excess oxygen from the excrement. She then placed the tube in a little baggie and put it aside. The next day she would analyze the bacteria within.
“I remember telling my mom, ‘I have to poop for class,’” Haggerty said. “It was the funniest thing. ‘Anything to get an A,’” she’d joked.
Haggerty had enrolled in the research section of Biology 173 upon the recommendation of other undergraduates who had taken the new experimental biology course. Microbial physiologist and ecologist Tom Schmidt had recently joined the University of Michigan faculty to study the human microbiome and found himself in need of research subjects. So when he saw a call for research proposals from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for programs designed to integrate research with undergraduate education, he saw the perfect opportunity. “That’s what HHMI brought to the table: it gave us a human cohort—healthy undergraduates.”
With a five-year, $1.5 million ...
