Women of Faith in Science: the Double Glass Ceiling

The majority of female pre-service elementary school teachers pursuing licensure is choosing English as their cognate rather than mathematics or science. The reason females are not choosing science as their cognate may be due to the fact that science has long been considered a masculine pursuit. To complicate the issue, pre-service female teachers of deep religious faith are further challenged to navigate the dichotomy of science and religion. As a result, women, and especially women of deep religious faith, are at risk of not participating in science studies. The author suggests that there is room in the science classroom for open dialogue with students regarding the distinction between science and religion. This dialogue may help students, especially women of faith, gain a deeper understanding of the nature of science and encourage participation in science

Electrostatic forces on charged surfaces of bilayer lipid membranes

Simulating protein-membrane interactions is an important and dynamic area of research. A proper definition of electrostatic forces on membrane surfaces is necessary for developing electromechanical models of protein-membrane interactions. Here we modeled the bilayer membrane as a continuum with general continuous distributions of lipids charges on membrane surfaces. A new electrostatic potential energy functional was then defined for this solvated protein-membrane system. We investigated the geometrical transformation properties of the membrane surfaces under a smooth velocity field. These properties allows us to apply the Hadamard-Zolesio structure theorem, and the electrostatic forces on membrane surfaces can be computed as the shape derivative of the electrostatic energy functional