A unique opportunity to work with human stem cells and to meet patients with Alzheimer’s disease had Sarah Dugal ’25 looking forward to class last spring. 

“I was very excited about the fact that it’s not a lecture-focused course,” she says of the undergraduate class, “Modeling Human Disease Using Stem Cells.” “It’s not something you get in a lot of these kinds of classes. It’s a very hands-on experience.” 

Students in the course manipulate human induced pluripotent stem cells for their own experiments in the lab, and then go out in the community to meet clinicians, caregivers, and patients. 

Instructor Chuck Toth, PhD, director of the Multi-Disciplinary Laboratories in the Office of Biology Undergraduate Education, says he built the course based on his experiences teaching biology at Providence College, where he also integrated stem cell biology into an undergraduate curriculum. 

Toth says students independently develop research projects related to Alzheimer’s disease. “Some are studying calcium, some are studying cholesterol metabolism, and some are studying inflammation,” he says. They culture and maintain stem cells lines, learn the fundamentals of gene expression and protein marker analyses, and participate in a scientific poster session. 

“It’s important that each of them are doing their own unique projects,” Toth says. “You can see that sort of excitement on their face, when their cells are doing well and the project is progressing.” 

The course offers what he calls bench-to-bedside training: Students also get to meet Alzheimer’s caregivers and patients as well as staff at the Butler Hospital Memory and Aging Program, plus they take part in community events like the 2025 Brown Brain Fair. 

“It’s easy to be in a lab and focus on yourselves and your projects to get results, but taking that and understanding what Alzheimer’s actually does to a patient and a caregiver is important,” Toth says. 

Jennesse Alejandro ’25 says she took the course for the research and community outreach opportunities. 

“Meeting with patients and family members to speak with them about Alzheimer’s and our research was also a testament to how much of an understanding we have of the disease since we first started,” Alejandro says. Melany Veliz ’25 says the course boosted both her academic and career aspirations. 

“As an undergraduate, this kind of course is extremely rare,” she says. “This will take us very far in our professional careers, and I’m hopefully going to aim for a research position after I graduate.”