The Art and Science of Zebrafish in the Classroom—An Interview with Melanie Fields

Abstract

Lara D. Hutson: We're here with Melanie Fields, who has done extensive work with zebrafish among secondary-school students. I'd just like to briefly introduce myself. I'm an assistant professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I study zebrafish neural development, although it turns out that the gene family on which I work is involved in the human degenerative disease known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. It's a neuromuscular disease and involves the degeneration of motor axons. We're making zebrafish models of it to examine the nongenetic factors that contribute to progression of the disease. Melanie, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Melanie Fields: I teach at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, which is a Quaker school. Lara D. Hutson: Do you have any children of your own? Melanie Fields: I have three children, ages 26, 21, and 17. My 26-year-old is partly responsible for my interest in zebrafish, because he went to the University of Oregon. I took a sabbatical that gave me a chance to visit with him and learn about zebrafish. Lara D. Hutson: Do you have any hobbies? Melanie Fields: I have quite a few hobbies. Our whole family-myself, my children, and my husband-loves to go rock climbing and backpacking, canoeing, and kayaking. Every year, during spring break at Sidwell, we take some students with us to the West Coast and other locales to go climbing and backpacking. Lara D. Hutson: Can you tell us a bit about the school, and what you teach and at what grade level? Melanie Fields: Sidwell Friends is a Quaker school, which means that it does things according to processes established by the Quakers, who are known formally as the Society of Friends. Its grades run from pre-K through 12, and it has about 1100 students. In the upper school, which is where I teach, there are about 460 students, and I teach what I call ''all flavors of biology.'' That includes honors classes; introductory biology for 9th-and 10th-grade students; advanced placement (AP) biology for 11th-and 12th-grade students; a neuroscience research course, where we work on zebrafish and other organisms; and a marine biology course, which I teach for 11th-and 12th-graders.