The University of Maryland is one of four institutions that have been chosen by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to lead a collaborative 4-year project to develop a model introductory science curriculum for pre-medical students. The new curriculum is based on helping students develop a suite of interdisciplinary scientific competencies, as outlined in the 2009 report Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, published by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the HHMI. This new approach is designed to better prepare students for success in science careers and medical practice.

The three institutions that will be collaborating with the University of Maryland in the National Experiment in Undergraduate Science Education (NEXUS) are Purdue University, University of Miami, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Each institution is focusing on a different aspect of the introductory pre-medical science curriculum. The University of Maryland's contribution is a revised physics for life science course sequence that builds broad, interdisciplinary scientific reasoning skills and provides students with conceptual knowledge of physics that affords them a deeper understanding of biological phenomena.

The effort at Maryland is being led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty, including Joe Redish (Physics), Wolfgang Losert (Physics), Karen Carleton (Biology) and Todd Cooke (CBMG). Redish has been teaching a pilot version of the new class this semester, with 24 students enrolled. The course is a radical departure in both style and content from the physics course traditionally taken by biology majors. Rather than passively listening to lectures during class meetings, students are actively engaged in solving problems that are authentic to the field of biology. Over the next several years, the team plans to develop a comprehensive set of instructional resources that could be adopted for use at other institutions.

The project was recently featured in an article in the publication Chemical and Engineering News.