Bates students working closely with Pelliccia and model organism C. elegans have learned how the small soil nematode worms regulate the movement of transposable genetic elements — what Pelliccia calls "jumping genes" — in their DNA.

To demonstrate how alcohol impairs gross motor skills, Pelliccia recently had 34 fifth- and sixth-graders from Lewiston's Longley Elementary School measure how quickly salt-water mussels absorbed food marked with red dye. Then the students — at Bates as part of a Service-Learning project — introduced alcohol into the seawater. Bombed out of their bivalves, the mussels ate much slower.

"It was a gas working with these kids," Pelliccia said. Teaching grade schoolers is "big-time different," but he said that the alcohol and mussel experiment is the same one he gives to first- and second-year biology majors at Bates. "The benefit to the local school kids is dramatic. Many of them had never been on campus except for a sporting event."

Back at Bates after two years of working at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Undergraduate Education, Pelliccia recently helped developed a grant proposal that resulted in a $1.3 million award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for science education at Bates. Working with colleagues in the departments of physics, biology and education, he also co-developed the Bates Science Education Scholars program to increase the number of Bates students who graduate certified for public school teaching.