Honors colloquium courses provide a space where faculty can blend personal interests with professional expertise to create one-of-a-kind learning experiences and opportunities for creative exploration. These courses often bridge seemingly unrelated disciplines, and this is a hallmark of one of the most popular and frequently offered colloquium courses, Protein Portraits, taught by biochemistry and biophysics professor Phil McFadden.
In Protein Portraits, students explore protein molecules and create their own artistic renderings of their structures. Over 15 years of teaching the course, McFadden has seen tea plant necrotic ring blotch virus reimagined as a hand-stitched tea cozy, prion proteins represented in a sculpture of a moody cow, and ranasmurfin — an electric-blue protein isolated from tree frog nests — transformed into a tropical Smurf-themed layer cake.
