We introduced first-year college students to immunology through courses without prerequisites that did not count toward any specific major. We used a novel “R” framework of immune functions—recognition, response, recruitment, resolution, regulation, repair, and remembering—that maintain tissue integrity in the context of changing internal and external environments and perturbations to introduce and emphasize conceptual understanding of immune responses (Supplementary material 1). Students practiced close reading, critical writing, informed conversation, compared and contrasted immunological content from peer-reviewed and journalistic sources, and reflected regularly on their learning to meta-cognitively (Wirth and Aziz, 2010) cement their immunology learning (Figure 1).

In “Bodies on Fire”—we studied post-infection sepsis, misdiagnosis of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis as schizophrenia, global increase in food and chemical sensitivities, and ended with a meditation on how self may be constructed through health, information, connection, and memory². Students mapped the immune system on life-size “immunological selfies” on butcher paper, read physician, patient, and scientist memoirs, and confronted the double-edgedness of protective and pathological inflammation. While some pursued further courses in cell biology and immunology, all of them appreciated the criticality of immunological understanding in the arenas of individual and public health.

“Health in the Anthropocene” linked inflammation, autoimmunity, and chronic infection to environmental pollution and human-accelerated climate change through heat stress, exposure to toxic pollutants, and chronic infections resulting from emerging, re-emerging, and shifting patterns of disease vectors. “AIDS, malaria, influenza: Ancient pathogens in a brave new world” integrated inflammatory responses, immunological memory, and geographic patterns of disease movement with the social, political, and environmental forcings of human activities. These courses asked students to connect a “cellular and molecular science” to planetary, societal, and ecological processes. Students were surprised, energized, and inspired by this connectivity and while some treated this first-year experience as a stepping stone toward a biomedically focused course of study, others took these understandings to majors in environmental studies, art, anthropology, literature, geography, and psychology.

Such courses can play a critical role in expanding undergraduate students’ access to foundational immune literacy. While we offered these as first-year courses, they can be offered as non-major courses without prerequisites for all undergraduates. Such foundational courses bring nuance to the understanding of inflammation and immunity, and help students connect immunology learning to personal experiences, global events, and understandings of systems-level phenomena, including climate change. This throughline to criticality, relevance, and timeliness makes the content feel less distant and arcane and more essential to many things that students care deeply about while boosting immune literacy across the board, regardless of the students’ intended majors.

We offered an upper-level immunology course with a laboratory almost every academic year, available to any students who completed the required previous coursework in chemistry, cell biology, and genetics. While the content emphasized innate and adaptive mammalian immune systems, we included discussions of bacteria, slime mold, ants, lampreys, African lungfish, plants, and algae to remind students of the evolutionary trajectory of host defense. We structured the class around the “R” framework (Supplementary material 1) and challenged students to animate the concepts with specific terminology, mechanistic analyses, and clinical applications. Students supplemented lectures and textbook reading with primary and popular literature. We used learning-centered assessments emphasizing comprehension, a “data-first” approach to analyzing primary literature through journal clubs (Supplementary material 2), independent group lab projects, and assignments that connected immunology to creative expression and community engagement.

We used two-stage assessments with individual problem-solving followed by a collaborative, small-group revision, to encourage cooperative learning. We also used oral final exams to assess students’ holistic understanding in the context of a broad, big-picture question on the function of the immune system in health and disease. To minimize anxiety associated with an unfamiliar approach, the students were provided the broad questions ahead of time, followed by more in-depth and clarifying real-time questions stemming from their opening answer in an individual conversation with the instructor. In both cases, students had the opportunity to clarify their understanding during the assessment, thus advancing their overall learning.

Moving away from the “banking model of education” (Freire, 1970), where the focus is on “depositing” information and understanding into students, we encouraged students to critically engage in transforming their understanding into social goods and activities. Students designed board games and interactive museum exhibits, and wrote children’s books. They volunteered with local and national community and advocacy organizations, including the Immune Deficiency Foundation. They made art (Chatterjea, 2020), podcasts, and lesson plans for a girl-focused STEM middle school in Saint Paul. Demonstrating their understanding of complex immune topics well enough to express them in myriad and sometimes unconventional ways challenged and rewarded students powerfully. Throughout iterations of this course, and indeed through almost all iterations of the other courses we describe in this perspective, we asked students to reflect regularly on their learning through short weekly written assignments—what struck them most, what was clear, what was confusing, what they were curious to learn, how immunology learning connected to other parts of their lives etc. This meta-cognitive intervention (Wirth and Aziz, 2010) was key to helping students take ownership of their learning and helped us reframe and redirect our instruction in real-time to make it more personalized for individual students and more effective overall.

The skills-based laboratory portion of the course allowed hands-on exploration, mastery of skills, project development, and hypothesis testing. We structured the lab to support iterative skill-building of basic immunology techniques, including in vitro cell stimulation, ELISA, and flow cytometry, allowing the students to use their knowledge to design and conduct a set of simple experiments to test the immunomodulatory potential of dietary supplements in teams culminating in a mini-research symposium of group oral presentation to share their findings. Throughout the course, we emphasized thorough experimental record-keeping in their laboratory notebooks, allowing students to develop skills for future careers in industry and academic settings.

This course, counted as an upper-level class toward biology and neuroscience majors and biochemistry emphasis across its many iterations, met the growing need for undergraduate students to engage deeply with core immunology principles, experimental approaches, and real-world applications for a variety of post-graduate biomedical training including immunology PhDs, medical school, and nursing school.

While the inquiry-based, skills-focused course lab was a strong and valued component of our immunology survey course and the biology curriculum overall, many students did not have space in their major plans for the time-intensive immunology survey with lab. For these students, and also for students who wished to build on that survey through deeper topical explorations, we offered elective primary literature-based immunology seminar courses on topics ranging from Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy to Neuroimmunology, all requiring chemistry, genetics, and cell biology coursework as preparation, but open to all students regardless of their major (Table 1).

Because of the mix of immunology expertise in these courses, it took intentional effort (mini-lectures and in-class problem-solving) to bring everyone to optimal learning and participation. Students who had not taken immunology frequently brought other expertise—neuroscience, biochemistry, microbiology—that enriched the learning experience for all students. We used scaffolded assignments to help students become careful and critical readers of research papers—to effectively parse data figures, find and use sources to better understand methods used (critical in a course with no laboratory), place the study in the context of what understandings came before and after, and identify both the significance of any given finding and the inevitable blind spots of any study design. Students took turns presenting figures from a paper in roundtable-style discussions and completed guided pre-class writing assignments (Supplementary material 2). For their culminating project, we asked them to write a synthetic review of an immunological topic of their choice or develop specific aims for a grant proposal in the area. For all students, these activities reinforced skills they had begun to acquire and resulted in deeper learning and connective, generative immunological thinking.

In these literature-focused classes, we also designed additional in-class activities and assignments to guide students towards a deeper societal application of their knowledge. Immunotherapy students participated in a book club discussion of a non-fiction book (Brain on Fire; Susannah Cahalan) about the immune system function and dysfunction, which also led to considerations of ethics in research and medical practice in the US. The Neuroimmunology seminar emphasized public communication of science and mental health awareness on campus and in the community through final projects that included podcasts, campus posters, and zines/leaflets for local community centers.

These courses counted as advanced electives for the Biology major and concentrations in neuroscience and biochemistry, thus supporting a broad range of curricular needs at our institution while providing access to a variety of immunology topics. Seminars on these and numerous other possible topics can effectively build sophisticated immunological understanding, provide a pathway for students to participate in the ongoing scientific “conversation” on the topic via the primary literature, and whet their appetites for further study in the field.

Learning immunological concepts and understanding how they were uncovered through research is essential, but developing the skills to do research requires a deeper level of engagement. These “research muscles” can only be built and strengthened through consistent practice. Yet, it is difficult to capture the dynamic, research-driven nature of immunology in a typical undergraduate course. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have aimed to address this gap throughout the college science curriculum (Soto et al., 2025). In practice, traditional course labs are converted to CUREs, but integration between lab and lecture, and insufficient time for students to engage with previous work in the field to inform authentic inquiry, remain challenging.

We addressed this challenge through Research in Immunology, a course focused on experimental design and mastery of methods structured as a mentored, team-based rotation in our research lab. Up to ten students, typically upper-class biology or neuroscience majors, and younger students curious about research (Table 1) collaborated with us and each other to identify novel questions within the scope of our research program. Students read, critiqued, and applied current research to develop hypothesis-driven projects and dissected published studies to refine their questions, while learning and optimizing methods required to pursue their inquiries.

This class was highly interactive and used many active learning approaches. “Journal club” discussions included roundtable discussions, concept mapping, and “mini posters” of figures redrawn and presented on whiteboards. In “Data club” students presented work in progress for peer and instructor feedback. To prepare for the journal club discussions, student facilitators took turns to prepare an introductory presentation contextualizing the studies, and other students completed reading responses to questions thoughtfully designed to guide their reading and understanding of scientific articles (Supplementary material 2); all students completed weekly learning reflections. For the laboratory portion, students learned fundamental techniques that they refined and mastered through repetition. As the semester progressed, students frequently met in addition to scheduled lab times to complete their group-based independent research projects. Each group produced a final summary of their work, either a short scientific paper or a poster presentation, detailing their experimental rationale, design, methods, findings, and significance presented at the final class meeting and opening the floor to discussion by the whole class (Figure 1). Some students subsequently joined our research team, completed honors or capstone projects, and contributed to 40 unique undergraduate authorships in 14 peer-reviewed publications. Nearly a dozen alums went on to enroll in immunology or related PhD programs, with several now producing and applying immunological knowledge as principal investigators and industry scientists.