Introductory freshman seminar publishes paper on Zika

Stanford News


March 22, 2017Introductory freshman seminar publishes paper on Zika Students in an infectious disease seminar quickly become Zika experts thanks to the epidemic’s sparse, rapidly changing history. In an unusual twist, their coursework culminated in a journal publication.





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By Taylor Kubota

While teaching her first class at Stanford last spring, Erin Mordecai wasn’t afraid to set the bar high. She challenged her students to tackle the emergence of Zika as the epidemic continued to grab headlines. She also made it known that, even though most of them were freshmen, they had a real shot at getting their research published.

Sixteen Stanford students in an introductory seminar explored the Zika epidemic and are now co-authors of a journal publication. (Image credit: R. Max Segnitz)

“I thought, ‘That would be so cool. I want to be published!’” said Sofia Ali, who was a freshman when she took the class. “I didn’t really know if we would follow through with it. It was just an idea.”
Nearly a year later, that extraordinary idea paid off. The 16 students in the seminar, plus Mordecai and a graduate student in the Peay lab, published their findings Feb. 9 in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Ali was lead author on the paper. See video here.
The classroom experiment was unusual in a field where most published scientific papers come from graduate students and faculty in established research labs. It was so extraordinary that in an online forum about the work, questions about how a class could publish a paper were as popular as those about the paper’s findings.
“I was really pleasantly surprised by the level of student buy-in and focus,” said Mordecai, who is an assistant professor of biology. “It was never a struggle to generate discussion or get people to participate. In fact, a couple of students did additional projects to ...


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