Professor of Biology, John Mecham, is the recipient of a Fulbright Lecture/Research Scholar award to Kenya for 2006. Dr. Mecham is also the PI on a one-year NSF grant which supports the development of an HIV/AIDS five-module course titled Life Science in Context: Sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Mecham represents Meredith in a five-college consortium that also includes Kenyatta University, North Carolina Wesleyan College, Guilford Technical Community College, and the University of South Carolina at Sumter.

The consortium focuses on the development of new curriculum that investigates the sociological and scientific facets of HIV/AIDS, parasitic diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, and other Sub-Saharan bioscience issues such as water and resource competition, nutrition, and plant biotechnology.

Dr. Mecham's work in Kenya focuses on the needs of Kenyatta University which were identified through participation in the consortium with a visit to the university in 2003.

The Kenya--Spring 2006 experience will be used to ...

• build partnerships and to integrate, into courses taught in the United States, scientific reasoning within a framework of commitment, activism, and social justice.
  

• understand and teach that scientific processes are not universal e.g. the questions that scientists ask and that they need to answer are shaped by the problems that they face in their communities and the information and technology to which they have access, and that, in developing countries, scientific problems have an urgency and cultural connectivity that we in the United States have difficulty appreciating.