LBC is offering a spring course on the Science of  the Foods you Love - beginning with all of our favorite snack - popcorn! - Next semester LBC students will be able to experience a course that gives them a new perspective on popcorn.  They will be able to enroll in the course LB 494 titled: "The Science of Food You Love: Making Better Microwave Popcorn." Some of the great benefits of this course is that students will have the chance to have hands on experience with working on industry science, have professional contacts with ConAgra Foods scientists, and have access to possible internships. For most students popcorn is merely a mid-day or even midnight snack to help curb an appetite until they can get their hands on a more sufficient meal.  But in the spring this year, those kernels will become more than just a dorm room snack.  

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(Story by: Ashleigh Rogers 09/2010)

Lyman Briggs Students Go Abroad - Paris, France. Known for its elegant beauty, high fashion, prestigious people, romantic atmosphere and timeless architecture, it is indeed a place of dreams to most people.  Certainly these may have been the initial views that a team of Lyman Briggs students held about the notorious City of Lights. However, these Briggsies didn't go to Paris simply for a vacation. They were participants in LBC's senior seminar course titled "Paris 2010" where they were required to propose and pursue a "30 Days" research element in Paris during the summer of 2010. Their research topic: homelessness in Paris. Homelessness is not usually something that comes to mind when people think of this romantic city. But in the short documentary titled, "Beg Your Way to the Top" the team of students highlighted this epidemic that is very common in the city of Paris.Read more about their Parisian voyage >>>. (Story by: Ashleigh Rogers 10/2010) 

Fellow Briggsie Receives NIH Director's New Innovator Award - Ben Major, Ph.D. has been awarded one of 33 National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Awards, a grant amounting to $1.5 million.  Major graduated from LBC in 1997 with a degree in  Microbiology. This particular grant, one of NIH's most prestigious grants, will fund his research in identifying the full complement of genes that contribute to specific cellular and disease processes, such as cancer.

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(Story by: Ashleigh Rogers 10/2010)

This past summer LBC instructor Lissy Goralnik took a group of her students to Michigan's Isle Royale for a course that is designed to bring students closer to nature.  Lissy Goralnik began instructing her Lyman Briggs students in 2008, where she encourages her students to understand that there are certain aspects of nature that simply cannot be taught within the constraints of a lecture hall.  It is with this philosophy that Goralnik leads her students on various field trips throughout the semester that allows them to develop a relationship with nature and the ethics of such.  "My goal is for my students to bring the worlds of science, philosophy, literature, natural history and even ecology together," Goralnik states. "I want them to bring the context of what we learn in the classroom to life." 

Read the story  (Story by: Ashleigh Rogers 10/2010)