Lucy E Delaney

on my work

The classic burn is that all biology is simply applied chemistry, and chemistry is simply applied physics, and physics is simply applied mathematics. To that I say, amen, and thank you for noticing just how hard it is to understand life. My students must (1) integrate concepts from across the scientific universe—chemistry, physics, mathematics, and then some—into a cohesive and useful framework, (2) recognize new and unpredictable emergent features at every level of scale, from elementary particles to ecosystems, and (3) appreciate that while humans may covet explicit definitions, biological phenomena rarely fit neatly into any of them. (That includes the phenomenon of life itself, by the way.) In biology, facts divorced from their larger contextual landscape are about as useful as interpreting a tapestry by memorizing the number of threads required to weave it. And yet memorizing facts is all we seem to do in our introductory sequences. So… what’s a professor to do instead?

Let me state the obvious: nothing I do fits neatly within the bounds of creative or scientific activity in any discipline. The act of teaching or learning (or living, by the way) is emotional, rife with messy contradictions and complexities that are often felt far more easily than they are explained. My work seeks to embrace the chaos of sensemaking and create alongside it. These days, I am in pre-production for That’s Life, an educational television program that enables me to experiment with novel teaching methods and gather long-term data on persistence and success of students in the biology major. You might also catch me eating cheeseburgers or roaming the campus on my Razor, O’Blivion.