Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.
From butterfly wings to ranked-choice voting patterns, the University of Chicago’s research-based courses push students to broadly engage their sense of curiosity.
Identifying big questions is just the beginning of this hands-on learning experience. The rest comes down to finding novel ways to dig up new knowledge about the world, often with the assistance of some of their fields’ leading researchers.
For the students of Prof. Mark Westneat, that search leaves no niche unstudied—no matter how small. Westneat teaches “Biomechanics: How Life Works,” a lab-based course in which students examine “how life deals with the forces of the world” through research.
The class is animated by big questions about the ways various creatures get around, probing such questions as to how fish swim, bumblebees fly and insects run. Through lectures and practice labs, students develop the knowledge and skills to become biomechanical researchers before applying their skills in independent projects of their own making.
“It is all original research,” Westneat said. “I’ve even had a couple of students go on to publish a paper on their biomechanics project.”
At the start of the quarter, students attend lectures and join Westneat for practice sessions in the lab. There, they learn how to measure force with a tensometer, capture video with high-speed cameras and use flow tanks—which Westneat says are “like treadmills for fish.”
Charlotte Wallsten, SB’25, described the early lab sessions as collaborative experiences where students had the freedom to be creative, testing ideas and equipment to see what they could learn.
“The first few weeks really felt like playing,” she said.
Westneat began one class by setting a container of cockroaches on a table. He invited students to develop a research question that they could test on the insects using the lab equipment. Ideas were tossed around until the group settled on finding how much force a cockroach can pull.
“One of my classmates attached a string to a cockroach and we monitored it using a force transducer,” Wallsten said. “The cockroach tried to walk away, so it was kind of like a Sisyphus cockroach.”
Wallsten had been writing a thesis that examined how butterflies perceive color, but wanted to explore the flexibility of their wings. By using a high-speed camera to record the butterflies in flight and a tensometer to measure force on their wings, she tried to find the breaking point—and couldn’t.
For Wallsten, the experience was a perfect complement to her thesis work.
“There is so much you can learn from one butterfly,” she said. "I loved how my class project connected to my thesis, even though it explored a totally different question."
Luke Friedman, SB’25, focused his project on bending bird feathers to test their strength.
He’d written a thesis on phenotypic plasticity of the pectoral fins of fish and used similar techniques to test both the fins and feathers—measuring their stiffness to draw conclusions about how they function for each species.
Friedman enjoyed the collaborative approach to designing a research project.
“While we learned how to use the equipment and these biomechanical concepts, Professor Westneat also gave us ideas for what we could potentially do for final projects,” he said. “In the class discussions, you also get ideas from other people.”
Students spend much of the quarter pursuing their own research in the lab. Westneat and his teaching assistants assume the role of lab assistants during this portion, providing mentorship and operational support for students as they become researchers.
Scientific research doesn’t typically stick to traditional business hours, so Westneat is often on call to open the lab for students, serve as a second set of hands for an experiment or answer questions.
“Working in the lab is when they flourish,” Westneat said. “They realize, ‘I can do this. I’m a scientist.’”
By the end of the course, students are ready to share the results of their work in the lab. Each writes a substantive final paper and delivers a short research talk to their peers.
“It was amazing to come together and see the huge variety of projects that people did,” Wallsten said.
The final presentations are Westneat’s favorite part of the class, too.
“Our undergraduates are brilliant, and their research talks are so creative. They’ve put so much into their work—it really is a joy,” he said.
Discovery across disciplines
While Westneat’s students were testing the forces of the natural world, students in Prof. Andy Eggers’ “Social Science Inquiry” course were examining the perceptions and attitudes of people across the political system.
Eggers teaches one of the final sections of the “Social Science Inquiry” Core sequence, a three-course series that introduces students to the theory and methodology of social science research.
In Spring Quarter, students work with faculty instructors to design and execute projects that address key course themes.
Two years ago, Eggers decided to try something a little different. Instead of having students complete independent projects, the class was going to form a research group and tackle one question together.
In the new model, Eggers chooses the broad theme—last year it was public opinion about climate change, while this year the class analyzed public opinion about ranked-choice voting. He then invites the class to collaborate to develop a research question, design and use a survey to answer that question, and write a research paper on the findings.
The first few weeks of the course are all about building a comprehensive knowledge base for students as they consider how to contribute to the scholarly conversation. They also analyze articles to identify gaps in previous research or problems with methodology, and brainstorm ideas for how to address those issues.
After the literature review, each student submits a proposal outlining a potential survey question and project design.
“I read the proposals to get a sense of where people's interests are,” Eggers said. “Then I see if there's a way to come up with a project that will incorporate a lot of their ideas but still be manageable.”
Irmak Altinok, a rising third-year majoring in biology, described the decision process as a series of class discussions where they homed in on a central question with increasing precision.
“What we found in all the studies that we read was that a lack of understanding of how ranked-choice voting works might be leading to voter dissatisfaction,” said Altinok. “But no one had actually tested it … we were like, maybe we should test that. The more we test the more complicated the data and analysis gets, so we had to find a compromise.”
Those discussions led most students to recommend versions of a ranked-choice voting comprehension survey in their proposals, which Eggers reviewed and distilled into one structured project. He then assigned various project roles to students, who described the second half of the quarter as feeling more like a research lab than a class.
“I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would,” said Andrew Arzac, a rising third-year double majoring in engineering and math.
Arzac worked on survey design, producing visuals and helping organize the flow. The experience shaped his perspective of how the fundamentals of research are similar across disciplines.
“Now when I’m doing problem sets—you really feel that things have a reason behind them. Once you've designed something and seen results come to it, you understand why some results are achieved,” Arzac said.
Once the survey was launched, the class project officially transitioned from theory to practice, giving students a chance to see the results of their work in real time. Their findings appear in a co-authored research paper, which Eggers will submit for publication at a peer-reviewed journal later this year.
For Eggers, whose research focuses on electoral systems and the relationships between money, politics and accountability, running the course as a lab has been a rewarding way to get students engaged and excited about social science research.
No matter where their academic path takes them next, Eggers has just one goal for every student.
“At the end of the course, they will have learned something that the world doesn’t know about yet—and they will write about it,” he said. “We’re going to intervene in the actual conversation and try to contribute to the knowledge of the research community.”