The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded a $1 million grant to Jo Handelsman, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin. The grant is one of 20 such grants given out to professors across the nation.

The 20 recipients were chosen from a pool of 150 professors nominated by their universities.

The grants are aimed at improving undergraduate science education, and recipients are expected to spend the money on programs bringing the classroom and research closer together.

“We will invite them into the community of science by including them in the conversation of the laboratory, which can be very intimidating to an undergraduate,” Handelsman told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Handelsman plans on creating a website called “The Spud Files” about the history of the Irish potato famine. The aim of the website is to present biology in sufficient depth to be useful in college courses while at the same time entertaining to the public. Information on the website will be accessible by anyone.

“She’s wonderful. You guys are lucky to have [Handelsman],” said Graham Walker, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Allana Schepartz, a professor of chemistry at Yale and one of the 20 recipients, said she would use her grant to introduce students to the field of chemical biology.

“The proposal I wrote described a course that would be taught to second-semester sophomores at Yale — a group of students who have finished a year of organic chemistry — and teach them about one of the most exciting new areas in chemistry, which is called chemical biology,” Schepartz said. “The proposal I submitted describes a paired laboratory and lecture course. In the lecture course, they actually learn about things going on right now in chemical biology, and in the lab course, they would do experiments for which there is no known answer. ”

Schepartz said the class would be unique because students would have the opportunity to publish their end-of-class results.

“Unlike labs based on textbooks, they won’t know the answer before they start, and unlike labs based on textbooks, they will get to publish their results because their results will be original,” Schepartz said.

Elizabeth Jones, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said she plans to introduce a software program that would enable students to solve genetic problems.

“We’re developing a software program — a cognitive tutor, it’s called — which allows student guidance from the tutor to learn how to solve genetic problems,” Jones said. “Imbedded in the software is a cognitive model on how they go about solving things. It has been developed largely in the math arena, and they are incredibly helpful, but they don’t exist for other subjects.”

Most of the professors plan to use their grant on undergraduate-level courses. Some, like Jones, plan on using some of the money for high schools.

“[The program] is primarily for undergrads, [but] I think we will be able to cannibalize it and take some of it to the high school levels,” Jones said.

Many of the professors said they hope the money from the grant will encourage students to enter biology and chemistry fields.

“It’s important to expose students to what a scientist really does in research,” Schepartz said. “When they take classes in chemistry and biology, they don’t really get the sense of what a scientist [does], and more importantly, they don’t get the thrill of learning something new that people are interested in.”