John Milton, M.D., Ph.D, Fellow, Royal College of Physicians of Canada, Fellow, American Physical Society, and the William R. Kenan Professor of Computational Neuroscience at The Claremont Colleges, has been awarded two National Science Foundation (NSF) research awards this fall.
Professor Milton has received a six-year NSF grant in the amount of $429,878 to help develop an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum in biology and mathematics for the Joint Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps colleges and a three-year $319,000 grant to support his research about how humans develop expertise in motor skills.
Milton will be the principal investigator for the proposal “Research Experiences at the Biology-Mathematics Interface.”
“With this type of effort, John is fulfilling our expectations for the Kenan Chair,” says Professor Newton Copp, Sidney J. Weinberg Jr. Professor of Natural Sciences, chair of department of Biology, Joint Science Department. “He is bringing people together across disciplines to expand quantitative work in neuroscience and biology.”
With NSF support, Milton brings together a team of educators spanning five institutions to re-design the Joint Science Department biomathematics curriculum so that topics most relevant for research at the cutting edge between biology and mathematics can be quickly introduced.
Co-principal investigators include Lissette de Pillis, professor of mathematics, Harvey Mudd College; T. Gregory Dewey, Robert E. Finnigan Professor of Applied Life Sciences, Keck Graduate Institute; Art Lee, associate professor of mathematics, Claremont McKenna College; and Mario Martelli, professor of mathematics, Claremont McKenna College.
The new curriculum will expose undergraduate students to the questions and problems regularly confronted by practicing scientists. During the summer of their junior year, student teams begin mentor-supervised research projects in biology using computer technology for data collection and running experiments. The researchers hope to make evident the meeting point between empirically and quantitatively oriented researchers and the application of mathematics as a laboratory tool.
The second grant will support Milton’s investigation into the deceptively simple topic of the motor skills associated with stick balancing. His internationally known research has yielded important insights into how the brain controls expert motor skills, research that may prove essential as the population ages.
While conducting groundbreaking research into the causes of falls among the elderly, Milton became interested in how the brain loses expertise in an area. He decided to study the problem from another angle – by studying the process of mastery. Stick balancing, says Milton, is essentially the same problem as trying to maintain balance while walking. The question, he says, is: “How does one develop expertise in the performance of a difficult motor skill?” Learning the answer to this question will help researchers interested in how we learn and forget skills, and how to teach those skills.