Dr. Laura Brown has been recognized by the College of Arts and Science with the 2022 David and Cheryl Morley Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience (ASURE) Program. This award recognizes exceptional teachers like Dr. Brown who give hope and strength to the entire Indiana University community. The Awards Committee cited the design of the course, and in particular, the research projects the students conducted under her tutelage.
Dr. Brown joined the Department of Chemistry faculty in 2011 and immediately took an active interest in providing course-based research experiences to undergraduates in the department. She has an ongoing research collaboration with Professor Julia van Kessel in the Department of Biology that is focused on inhibition of quorum sensing in bacteria as an alternative to antibiotics, and she turned this project into a three-week research module in an upper-level organic laboratory course. Subsequently, she expanded the idea into a two-semester sequence within the context of the ASURE program. Freshmen in their spring semester work to assay and model a series of inhibitors, and then propose a new library of small molecule inhibitors that they will synthesize and analyze in the fall of their sophomore year.