Exploring the Routes to Student-Faculty Collaboration at BMC

At Bryn Mawr College, the spark of discovery often catches fire through partnerships between faculty and undergraduate students who work together to ask bold questions and seek innovative answers. 

These partnerships inspire curiosity and lead to tangible outcomes, including co-authored publications that contribute to scholarly conversations across disciplines. 

Professor of Education Alison Cook-Sather works with students in various ways through the College’s Education Department and Teaching and Learning Institute (TLI), including partnering on research and publications. 

“We’re always thinking about how to expand the benefits of pedagogical partnership work beyond classroom-focused, student-faculty partnerships both in the Education Department and through the TLI,” she says. “One of the ways to do that is through ongoing assessment of student experiences and new research. And who better to do that work than students who are passionate about it?” 

One of Cook-Sather’s most recent publications is “Developing an Inclusive, Student-Led Approach to Scaling Up the Benefits of Pedagogical Partnership for Social Justice in Higher Education,” which reports on a multi-year research project she undertook with Abhi Suresh ’24 and Dante Nguyen (HC ’25), both of whom completed majors in Education Studies and worked as TLI student consultants. 

Cook-Sather first co-authored with students in 2001, and of the 39 pieces of work she’s had accepted for publication over the last several years, including 13 articles for peer-reviewed journals, half have been co-authored with students.  

Associate Professor and Chair of the Bi-Co Linguistics Department Brook Danielle Lillehaugen also has a long history of collaborating with students, taking them to do field work in Oaxaca, Mexico, and co-authoring articles, the latest of which is “Towards a Digital Dictionary Based on the Colonial Valley Zapotec Corpus.” Lillehaugen and three of the four Bryn Mawr student co-authors, Esenia Banuelos, Lillian Chan, Madeline Murname, and Roma J. Srathi, presented their research at a conference in Mexico in May. 

Professor of Chemistry Sharon Burgmayer has prepared students to be researchers for her entire 39-year career at Bryn Mawr. Throughout the years, Burgmayer has partnered with students on more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals. 

“Mentoring, supervising, and training undergraduate students in research has been the joy of my career at BMC,” she says. “It is a rich enterprise with a variety of components. There is a teaching component: learning new lab techniques and about new areas of chemistry. There is a team aspect, not unlike team sports, where research members rely on others’ support and success. There is research’s problem-solving, puzzle aspect: how to resolve experimental problems or interpret data. And there is even a psychological component: how to deal with failed experiments or uninterpretable results, as those are juxtaposed to the thrill of success.” 

Burgmayer’s latest co-authored publication, “Molybdenum Cofactor Model Reveals Remarkable Redox Activity at Both Molybdenum and the Pyranopterin Dithiolene Ligand,” was done with Jinming Liu ’22, Angelina Rogatch ’25, Benjamin R. Williams M.A. ’11, Ph.D. ’15, Chelsea Freer ’25, and Chiara Zuccoli ’25. 

There are many paths Bryn Mawr students can take to do research with a professor. 

“If I receive a call for papers or an invitation to write a chapter, or an article, or something like that, I’ll sometimes think, ‘This reminds me of some of the thinking or work a student has done in my course or through the TLI,’ and I invite them to partner with me,” explains Cook-Sather. 

Other times, a collaboration results from students and Cook-Sather coming up with a unique idea in a class or as part of the TLI and then investigating it to the degree that it warrants publication, which is how the article with Suresh and Nguyen came about. 

“That’s a slower process and I’ve had students who graduate and still continue to do research with me,” notes Cook-Sather. 

That happened with Suresh, who is still working on another article with Cook-Sather and says, “Hopefully, I will continue to work with her on research into the future!” 

For students in the sciences, the road to collaboration goes through the lab. 

“A graduate student (Dr. Cassandra Gates) invited freshmen into the lab and I had to take the opportunity,” recalls Zuccoli. “Dr Gates ended up being my mentor and eventually passed on her project to me when she graduated.”