By: Jazmine Robinson
Educators are the unsung heroes of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), acting as the vital link between complex concepts and curious minds. They transform what could be daunting lectures into dynamic, hands-on experiences that spark a lifelong passion for discovery. This is especially true in STEM fields, where a great teacher doesn’t just present facts; they equip students with the tools to question, create, and solve problems.
Our next guest on Faces of Innovation, Jennifer “Hutch” Hutchison, is a perfect example of this. As an educator professional learning specialist at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, she works tirelessly to provide teachers with the resources they need to bring classroom standards to life, ensuring students are actively engaged and inspired to connect with the material.
Jazmine Robinson: Tell us a little bit about your background and career journey so far.
Jennifer Hutchison (Hutch): I taught at Huntsville High School for 11.5 years. When I started my teaching career, I got involved with a statewide initiative called AMSTI, the Alabama Math, Science Technology Initiative, which helped me with materials and resources for my own classroom.
When a job became available to become the biology specialist for this region of Northeast Alabama, I went from being a classroom teacher to training teachers. That started my effort at working with teachers and then delivering materials to them, using this statewide initiative to be able to deliver materials to teachers that were unaffordable at the classroom level. So, as a district, we could provide things like gel electrophoresis rigs and things a single school system really couldn’t afford otherwise.
Through that job, I started doing Science in Motion, which was the exact same time that Dr. Lamb was working out of the AdTran building, before HudsonAlpha’s facility was ever built. We grew in our jobs together, me as a Science in Motion specialist and him as the (then) vice president for educational outreach at HudsonAlpha. I came to HudsonAlpha 7 years ago.
Jazmine: Did you always want to be a teacher?
Hutch: I have always known that teaching was what I wanted to do. I know this is going to sound very cliché, but I’ve never felt like I’ve gone to work a day in my life. I love the work that I do, and right now, in particular, I’m extremely excited about the opportunity I’ve gotten to work with the WIREGRASS Peanut Project in the Wiregrass region.
Jazmine: Tell us about the Peanut Project.
Hutch: I would say it’s probably the most significant thing I’ve done in 30 years of teaching. When we started the project, I really couldn’t understand how or even if it was going to work. Let me give you a specific example of how the project works. Imagine you’re a ninth-grade student at Carver Ninth Grade Academy, and you get to be a part of a project in which you are planting a peanut seed, you are tending to it, taking care of it, and you’re extracting high-quality DNA from it. You are getting a DNA sequence to tell you that the particular plant that is grown from the seed that you got from us is going to have amazing traits, like it’s potentially going to be drought-tolerant, or it’s going to be resistant to aflatoxin, smut, or Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus. You have the potential for all of these things to happen and ultimately impact not just the farmers, but your entire community.
That first semester in spring of 2023, after eight weeks of planting seeds, growing plants, extracting DNA, and conducting sequencing—the first time that I was in the classroom and watching students synthesize all of it—I was blown away. They loved the opportunity to have their hands on equipment that they would never have been afforded in the classroom. Watching them think critically about the traits they want in peanuts is amazing because they grasp the importance of different traits for human health, such as with aflatoxin, or crop yields in the Wiregrass region, which directly impact the income farmers bring home to their families. It was incredible to witness students make sense of the long process of going through all those steps of the project.
Jazmine: What students are you working with in this project, specifically?
Hutch: We work with students from a variety of classes—ninth-grade biology, environmental science, AP Biology, and agri science. We have a plethora of different students. The goal is for them to work with us for one semester. We began in the city of Dothan, so we work with Dothan High School and Carver Ninth Grade Academy. Then, we started branching out into Houston County schools as well. Now, we’ve even branched out further than that, to where we have impacted at this point, over 700 student scientists. At the end of this year, we have impacted over 900 students in 11 different schools.
We’re not only teaching the students about science and jobs in agriscience; we bring so much to these students because we’re a collaborative team across the different departments at HudsonAlpha. For example, in 2023, Chris Powell, HudsonAlpha’s talented videographer, came to Dothan to get footage of peanut planting day. We had a student from Dothan High School who was mesmerized by what Chris was doing. The student returned last year as a peer helper and shared with me that he is now in college to study video production.
Jazmine: I want to ask what else your role entails, but this sounds like a lot in itself. Do you have any other projects that you are working on?
Hutch: The peanut project is certainly a big deal, and I have such an affinity for it—I love it so much. For eight weeks every summer, I also get to mentor a Biotrain intern, a pre-service educator who is in school to become a teacher. Those are probably the two things that I love the most about my position.
I also get to host regional workshops for high school and middle school educators and develop activities for classrooms. It is particularly exciting to develop activities from scratch that you know will be impactful in a classroom. I’m currently working on that for the round of G.R.E.A.T workshops set to begin next month.
Going from a classroom where I had seven periods in a day and 150 students to now having the potential to impact 150 teachers who each have 150 students, you just want everything to be amazing. You want to create things that will truly impact student learning and student achievement. These roles are incredibly important in the work that we do.
Jazmine: What would you say is the most challenging aspect of your work?
Hutch: Probably the most challenging aspect is linked to one of the other things that I talked about earlier, which is just the constant changing of hats. Going from, for two hours today, I might be working on developing an activity, and then I may need to go read some papers and try to get myself more grounded in a particular concept, so that I can know it at a deeper level, so that I can teach it in a way that students will understand it and teachers will understand it, and then realizing that I am leaving for Dothan and making sure that I’ve got all the things that I need ready for that visit. While the constant back-and-forth is challenging, it’s also exciting because no day is the same, and it makes everything exciting.
Jazmine: How do you stay motivated and passionate about your work?
Hutch (laughs): I do not lack motivation. There may be some days when you struggle, trying to come up with an idea for an activity, and then swing and a miss. But then, you’ll be in a classroom and those kids start making sense out of science, and start talking about things that are very non-egocentric, thinking about the world in front of them, and you go, ‘Oh my gosh, that just filled my cup for a year.’ So, while there may be challenges, because of the position that I’m in, I get to be immersed in all these experiences that continually fuel me to keep wanting to do what I’m doing.
Jazmine: What advice would you give aspiring students interested in pursuing a career in education?
Hutch: Be strong, and don’t be afraid. Teaching truly is the best profession in the world. As an educator, you are preparing young people to take on the important work of the future. Future teachers, don’t be discouraged by not having all the answers. The world is changing quickly, and that’s part of the journey. Whenever you’re given an opportunity, take it, even if it feels intimidating. That experience may be the moment you discover, “Yes, this is what I want to do.” Or just as importantly, it may help you realize, “No, this isn’t for me.” Both answers matter. Knowing what you don’t want to do is just as valuable as knowing what you do want to do.
