In August this year I received the following note from Michele Hardy, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Montana State University:
I’m writing to ask if you’d be willing to participate in my undergraduate/graduate virology course this fall. We have several guests per semester that we Skype in to talk with students. I was thinking of you as a guest to talk with them about poliovirus, but also about your role in TWiV. It’s not a lecture format, instead teams of students will research your work and come up with a set of questions that we would provide to you in advance. In the past they’ve asked specifically about research areas, but also are really interested in what people’s backgrounds are, how they got to be where they are now, etc. We give them pretty much free reign to ask whatever they want to, whether it’s virus-specific or not. Our goal is to get them excited about virology and so we don’t put restrictions on what they’re allowed to talk about. Sometimes they stick to the questions they submit, others they take whatever direction the discussion goes. There are ~60 students, 8-10 of them are graduate students. We encourage them to listen to TWiV a few times a semester so I think they’ll be excited to talk with you. Thanks for considering this, I look forward to hearing from you.
This past Monday I joined the class via Skype. The questions ranged from how I became interested in and use social media, to polio eradication. Listen to our conversation by clicking the arrow below.
[powerpress url=”https://s3.amazonaws.com/twiv_audio/Hardy_virology_class.mp3″]
Click arrow to play | Download (35 MB .mp3, 48 min)
Update: Received a nice thank you card from the class:
