Cover Story

GETTING IN STEP WITH STEM

New Technology-Based Majors Add Breadth and Value to the Monmouth Experience

By Barry McNamara

To various degrees, Monmouth College students have been able to touch on the fields of engineering, neuroscience and data science for several years. But starting this fall, they will be able todive much deeper into those subjects, as the three STEM disciplines are on course to be fullfledged academic majors at the College.

“It’s really our time,” said physics professor Chris Fasano. “It’s our time because we have things to contribute that are valuable and that are exciting for both students and the world.”

Interim Dean of the Faculty Mark Willhardt agreed on the value of adding new programs focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“We’re trying to answer the demands of higher education right now by building programs that we not only believe in but that are taking advantage of what we do best—our liberal arts foundation,” he said.

Mathematics and computer science professor Logan Mayfield, who will help oversee the data science major, said Monmouth’s academic environment is an ideal setting for a major that cuts across many disciplines.

“At a liberal arts college, it’s really easy for us to say to our data science majors, ‘As a part of your program here, you need to go out and take courses outside of our department,’” he said. “Not just develop the technical expertise to collect data, curate data, process data, model the data, but communicate that to business people and others who aren’t data scientists.”

Data science is the youngest of the three majors, as colleges and universities only started to add it within the last decade. Neuroscience and engineering have longer histories, and they’ve been on the minds of Fasano and chemistry professor Laura Moore for quite some time.

“We have students who ask for neuroscience,” said Moore, who joined the faculty in 2006. “They’ve been asking for it for years. There are current students here who are waiting to change their majors to neuroscience.”

ENGINEERING AND THE LIBERAL ARTS

"I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” said Fasano of the engineering major, which will include three tracks—chemical, electrical and mechanical.

Professor Chris Fasano

Fasano calls engineering “the creative or human response to the innate wish that people have to solve problems by building things.” In its best form, he said, it’s the synthesis of science, business, art and design, which makes it a perfect major for a liberal arts college such as Monmouth.

“Engineering is a human activity; it’s a creative activity,” he said. “Modern engineering education is recognizing this and recognizing that engineering is a human activity; it’s a creative activity," he said. "Modern engineering education is recognizing this and recognizing that engineering should be thought of in the context of the liberal arts. So it’s really appropriate for us now; we have something to offer in engineering.”

Because of the College’s distinctive general education curriculum, Fasano said it is a given that Monmouth’s engineering students will become good technical problem-solvers.

“But we want more than that, because the problems of the world that need to be solved and need technical solutions also need people who understand the culture of the solution that they’re proposing,” he said.

And that’s where Monmouth’s approach to education, with a rich heritage that dates to the mid-19th century, puts the College’s students in the right place for the 21st century.

“That’s the setting for what engineering needs to become in the future—culture, contents, consequences and communication, in addition to the problemsolving,” said Fasano. “These are things that Monmouth College has done well for its entire history. That’s the nature of liberal education; that’s what we do. We get people to see the context of what they’re doing.”

That’s also why Willhardt noted that adding majors related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics will not change Monmouth’s identity.

“We believe wholeheartedly that these new STEM programs do not make us the University of Illinois,”he said. “They make us a better Monmouth.”

THE ETHICS OF DATA SCIENCE

Mayfield pointed to the ethical and moral anchoring that a Monmouth education gives students as another reason why data science is an ideal major to be offered by the College.

He noted that there is an abundance of “stories of people who collect data they shouldn’t or do inappropriate things with data. ... One of the real challenges facing data science is how to make ethical decisions with the data that you have.”

Professor Logan Mayfield

Because data science is a relatively new academic discipline, Monmouth students can study the ethical implications of the field in real time as it plays out in events around them.

“Certainly the backlash against Facebook has a lot to do with this,” said Mayfield. “At Monmouth, we can engage our students in both the ‘What can we do with the technology and the tools,’ but also ‘What should we be doing?’ How do we make the right decisions with the data, and not just hungrily gather the data and do whatever we want with it?”

Data science majors will learn to answer those questions not only through classes within their department, but in other disciplines as well.

“We have the technical background, but we can also interact very easily with our partners in the humanities or other disciplines and really provide both a grounding in doing the right thing with data and then being able to really apply data science to a large number of fields,” said Mayfield. “We are excited about developing partnerships with other departments and having our students take courses outside the major so they can learn the problems faced in different disciplines in business and economics, in the sciences. They’ll learn how to collect that data and best communicate that to the advertisers, the marketing, or just somebody reading a data-driven news article on a website.”

Mayfield expects the role of data science to expand in the technology-driven world economy.

“Over the last decade or so, this field has coalesced as a collaboration of sorts between partners in statistics, computer science, mathematics and other disciplines that are using data to drive their decision-making process, to find new products, to communicate more effectively,” he said. “It’s not just for the traditional hard sciences or business, but for fields like journalism or really just about any place where you find yourself sitting with tons of data and wanting to do interesting things with it.”

THE MACRO AND MICRO OF NEUROSCIENCE

Neuroscience is also a blend of academic disciplines, including two recent additions to the College’s curriculum—biochemistry and biopsychology.

“At the macroscopic or top level in science, you have animal behavior or human behavior,” said Moore. “You go down a level, and you have neural networks. At the next level, you have the neuron, and at the very bottom level you have molecular—the proteins and the compounds that might affect how the neurons behave. In our neuroscience curriculum, we’re going to bring all those together. We’re planning that the students will get a broad scope.”

Professor Laura Moore

The neuroscience curriculum will have two tracks—one focused on the macroscopic level and the other on the microscopic level.

“But all of the majors will be spread over all the departments and even outside the departments,” said Moore. “We’re hoping to put a philosophy course within the neuroscience major; computer science will probably be in there because of the need to understand networks and how things work. Data science will probably be in there, too. It’s nice that there’s a synergy between all these programs that are going to be on board.”

One of the major’s goals is to prepare students for graduate school. Currently, Monmouth students who want to study neuroscience in graduate school usually go through a master’s program. In chemistry or biochemistry, however, Monmouth students are often able to enroll in doctoral programs because of the extensive research backgrounds they acquire across their four undergraduate years. Moore hopes the College’s neuroscience majors will be able to take a similar path.

"We think that by having a neuroscience program that gives students more research within their discipline, they will be able to pursue a Ph.D. more effectively," said Moore.

In addition to health-related careers, neuroscience prepares students for careers that tackle issues in global health. Psychology professor Marsha Dopheide said neuroscience is a perfect major for a student who has a lot of diverse interests—and it also fits well with the College’s Global Public Health Triad.

Professor Marsha Dopheide

“Because neuroscience is such a broad field, it can be a difficult major to define,” she said. “Somebody in neuroscience might be a neuro-philosophist. They might be someone who works in the business sector and helps advise patent offices with patents they are working on with neuro-biological inventions. They could work on brain machine interfaces, known as neuro-prosthetics. They can also get involved in neuro-pharmaceuticals with research and development. The field has been growing a great deal.”

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Willhardt said that what distinguishes the three new STEM majors is the amount of research and time that were invested in their development. The programs were developed by Monmouth faculty, approved by the College’s governing bodies and then tested by an academic market-research firm.

“The research firm tested these majors, along with a few others, by running them out to prospective employers and students,” he said. “When they reported back to us, they said these rose to the top because there is employability in these fields for the next decade and, even better, there is significant student demand for them.”

Fasano has referred to his department producing “renaissance engineers.” It might also be appropriate to talk about “renaissance data scientists” and “renaissance neuroscientists” emerging from the other two STEM majors.

“What we mean by ‘renaissance engineers’ is people who can do many things and appreciate many things,” said Fasano. “There are many examples of why this is important. We’ll graduate great engineers.”