Michelle Mondoux Paused at the Middle — And it Changed Everything

The first snowflakes of the season are falling outside O’Neil Hall on a grey Tuesday morning in November, and inside, Associate Professor Michelle Mondoux has been reviewing and practicing sample problems with her cell biology students for nearly an hour. She’s getting ready to switch gears to new material, but first, pauses to recap what they’ve done. 

“This is beautiful and complicated,” she declares, “and we’ve done a lot of work.” 

Mondoux is talking about membrane proteins, but, really, she’s talking about life. 

Ask Mondoux about her work, and you’ll learn a lot about educating today’s students and how worms reproduce. But inside every scientific teaching is a metaphor for being human, an observation she’s made in the lab or the classroom and tries to apply to life. These are lessons she’s tried to impart in her classes, which she says she’s still learning herself. They are also lessons that have stuck with her colleagues and former students. Ann Sheehy, professor of biology, calls these “Michelle-isms.” Mondoux calls them “things I tell my students that also apply to me,” as she explained in a 2023 lecture to her peers and the greater College community. But whatever you call them, they’re lessons that Mondoux has spent her career learning and unlearning, rethinking the way she teaches — sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding — all in the name of one unchanging priority: her students.

“THE MOST INTERESTING THING” 

Mondoux has been a member of the Holy Cross faculty for more than 16 years, and her passion for teaching science is evident every day, like that of a curious child. It’s a love that started early, with mail-order science kits and a mother who taught first grade. In sixth grade, a college professor visited her class for career day and Mondoux learned that such a job existed. She knew then that the combination of teaching and research was her ultimate goal. And she acknowledges how unusual that realization is. 

“My husband jokes that I shouldn’t tell students this, because I think my path was way too clear,” Mondoux says. “It’s not how most people’s careers go.” 

A high school biology teacher introduced Mondoux to genetics, cell biology and DNA, and she fell in love; she even found the same chromosomes poster that adorned her high school classroom and hung it in her Smith College dorm room. That passion later carried her into lab work at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, to a Ph.D. program at Princeton University and, then, a post-doc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Throughout it all, she thoughtfully, persistently pursued the goal she set for herself at 11: to teach at a liberal arts college.

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Mondoux’s undergraduate days at Smith College, participating in summer research in 1997 (left) and at graduation in 1998 (right).

“She was interested, from the very beginning, in being at a small liberal arts college with an emphasis on teaching,” says Virginia Zakian, Mondoux’s Ph.D. adviser and professor emerita of molecular biology at Princeton. “It’s so unusual to come in knowing what you want and then to really seek out opportunities for yourself. She was an activist for herself and for other people. She took responsibility for her future.”

“I led with my future goal and the needs of the [liberal arts] environment,” Mondoux explains. “I’m a liberal arts student at heart. I have always had a broad range of interests, and I knew whatever scientific problem I ended up working on, I would find it the most interesting.” At the NIH, Mondoux found her research focus: C. elegans, a microscopic worm used as a model organism for research due to its genetic and cellular similarities with humans. It also has the added benefit of being ideal for use in an undergraduate research setting because of accelerated reproduction timelines and lifespans. Combined, these factors enabled Mondoux to set up a lab at Holy Cross that studies the impact of high-glucose diets on fertility – and added another passion to her list.

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At Princeton University in 2004, with Tom Silhavy, Mondoux’s first grad school professor, and Ginger Zakian, her Ph.D. adviser.

“DEDICATE CLASS TIME TO WHAT’S IMPORTANT” 

What gets Mondoux out of bed in the morning? The answer is immediate. 

“The worms and the students,” she says with a grin. 

A few years into Mondoux’s career at Holy Cross, biology department faculty decided to rethink how Introduction to Cell and Molecular Biology, a core class for bio majors, was taught. At the time, withdrawal rates were approaching 15% to 20% by the end of the course, according to Sheehy. The traditional lecture-based approach to teaching science was no longer working.

Mondoux, Sheehy and a group of colleagues began team-teaching the intro course and overhauling the curriculum. Like the scientists they are, they approached the challenge like an experiment, testing countless new techniques to see what worked and what didn’t, and painstakingly kept track of the results.

“Everybody in the biology department that has a lab is an experimentalist at heart; that’s probably who their identity was first. Before anything else, before they were a teacher, they were a curious person who wanted to go in and say, ‘What happens if…?’” Sheehy says. “At her heart, Michelle was an experimentalist, and was willing to try and keep track of which things were working.”

Many of these changes aimed at centering the student as the learner, not the professor as the teacher. This developed from a growing realization, one that came to a head in 2020 when professors had to pivot to virtual classrooms: Students were not all starting from the same place when they came to Intro Bio. They enrolled with varying levels of prior knowledge in math and science, different access to technology and dissimilar life circumstances that impacted how they learned. 

“We worked really hard in that class for every student to have the opportunity for success, no matter who they are and no matter where they’re coming from,” Mondoux explains. “And that requires us to really think critically about who we are and where we’re coming from.”

For Mondoux, that meant establishing a guiding principle from which all decisions are made: to be a “facilitator of student learning.” Her first priority is each student as a person, her second is that they’re learning. Every decision comes back to one core question: “What is better for student learning?”

And most of the time, the answer is not “more science.” Mondoux places a major emphasis on writing and communication skills, to help students better learn the material, and to help them succeed after college. She starts each class having students greet each other and weaves in time for them to ask questions or work through a problem together, building an environment of trust and respect. She offers different ways for students to participate and find their confidence. Another guiding principle, or “Michelle-ism,” is dedicating class time to what’s important. This means that there are no guessing games for students, no secrets to success, no leaving students to figure out a concept for themselves. She’ll change her lesson plans on the fly if students need more time with the material.

On paper, the results are clear: The biology major has nearly doubled in enrollment, and most Intro Bio students remain in the sciences in one way or another, according to Sheehy. But, more importantly, the results are felt in the classroom. Mondoux says if you compare her syllabi over the years, not much has changed, but the classroom environment has been transformed. 

“It can be difficult to quantify and label the things we do in the classroom that facilitate student learning,” Mondoux explains. “But I think that the environment of the classroom and the approach to assignments and the approach to how I think about, ‘What am I doing here? What am I trying to help students achieve?’ — that is pretty radically transformed. It’s hard to see on paper, but it’s easy to feel in the classroom.”

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Mondoux in her natural environment: the classroom.

Back to that classroom on a cold November morning, and you can see all these elements in play. Mondoux spent the majority of the class working out additional problem sets to illustrate how proteins are inserted into cell membranes because the students needed it; she could tell they hadn’t grasped the concept. By the end of class, nearly all participated, nodding heads and audible “ohs” signal their understanding. The chalkboard is covered in examples. 

“The classroom is really her environment,” Sheehy says. “She uses the board so effectively. And if you walk in right before she erases the boards after one of her classes, they’re full. She’s moving around and keeping people invested in the material.”

This teaching strategy has produced a trickle-down effect far beyond her classes. Zachary Nicholson ’23, now a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recalls a time when, as a senior, he gave a presentation in one of Sheehy’s classes. He had to present a figure on the screen and explain it without any supporting materials. Channeling Mondoux, he turned his presentation into a “chalk talk,” drawing on the board to break down concepts just the way she taught him.

“I finished and I don’t think I got any questions,” Nicholson remembers. “The only thing Professor Sheehy said was, ‘Well, I know you were in the Mondoux lab.’”

“YOU HAVE TO FEEL EMPOWERED TO BE WRONG” 

Whether in the classroom or in the lab, Mondoux is teaching more than just biology. She’s also imparting lessons and skills that can make her students better scientists, better communicators and better human beings. 

And according to Mondoux, one of the most important lessons in science — and in life — is failure.

“We are wrong all the time as scientists,” she says. “If we acknowledge that feeling empowered to be wrong is essential to success as a scientist, which I would strongly argue for, then my job has to be to create an environment where everyone feels empowered to be wrong.”

This includes not knowing the right answer to a question or having a reasonable hypothesis turn out wrong. But Mondoux emphasizes that no matter what, students need to first feel like they belong in the biology classroom and the scientific community in order to feel empowered to be wrong. If they feel like they do not belong, she explains, then they may feel that they risk losing their seat at the table if they are wrong.

“I want students to feel comfortable in my classroom — that if they offer an answer to a question and they weren’t right, it’s OK. But where it’s really important to be empowered is when you’re taking your best available knowledge and your best thinking, your best skills, and you have an idea that then does influence the science,” Mondoux says. “Because if you don’t feel empowered to be wrong in that scenario, how are we ever going to have new ideas, new thinking, move forward in any capacity?”

Katie Guilbo, M.D., ’19 was a Mondoux student in her first year at Holy Cross and later joined her lab. “Going into undergrad, I was just very shy and very quiet. I didn’t like to participate,” remembers Dr. Guilbo, now a pediatric resident at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s in Cleveland. “I was always afraid of being wrong. She encouraged me to throw ideas out there and participate, and she made her classroom a safe space to be wrong. Even now, as a doctor, not every patient case is super straightforward. Being able to collaborate with other members of the team and throw ideas out there, it’s OK to be wrong.”

In 2010, Amanda Engstrom ’12 was Mondoux’s first-ever lab student. She knocked on Mondoux’s door while the latter was still unpacking boxes, and together, they started the work that would become the foundation of the Mondoux lab, research that still has implications 16 years later. Many of those early days were characterized by negative results, Engstrom recalls. But that’s what made it so exciting. 

“Something that I learned from her, and has been re-instilled in me with my mentors moving forward, is: How do you design an experiment that, even if you get negative data, you still learn something? How do I take this thing that didn’t happen the way we expected it to? What can we still learn from it?” Engstrom says. “Honestly, getting the negative data and getting the difficult – or the unexpected – result was what excited me about science.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with being wrong,” Mondoux says. “It just means that there’s more in the world to discover.” 

Another “Michelle-ism” Engstrom internalized, and now uses with the students and trainees in her post-doc lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston: “Science is never the place to be embarrassed.” 

“We all make mistakes,” Engstrom says. “Just tell me. We can fix it. But you can’t fix it down the line later.”

“APPROACH SOMETHING WITH A SENSE OF PURPOSE” 

Mondoux says she is at her best educating and mentoring early-stage scientists and learners – whether they’re new to research, new to the next level of biology or new to Holy Cross. 

“Each of the groups is at the beginning of some new phase. I’m just really excited about the things that I study, and I think there’s no cooler way to think about it than to think about people who are learning how to think about it for the first time,” Mondoux says. Their reactions, whether it’s understanding a topic for the first time, or getting a result from an experiment that no one has ever produced, are what she loves most: “It’s the reactions that make the beginning special.” 

Spend any time with Mondoux and you can tell her excitement is contagious. It’s what attracted Dr. Guilbo to Mondoux’s lab and became a guiding principle for her career: “She’s just so excited to teach. When I have medical students now that are following me around, I want to be as excited about my work as Michelle was to teach us about the biology of aging, or cell biology, or as excited as she was in the lab.”

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(Top) With Zachary Nicholson ’23 (fourth from left) and the rest of the Mondoux lab spring 2023 cohort. (Bottom) With Katie Guilbo, M.D., ’19, and lab students Lizzie Flynn ’19 and Kerry Larkin ’20 at commencement in 2019.

The excitement is only the beginning, though – the novelty wears off, the experiments fail, the breakthroughs take years. Time, patience and belief are all needed to keep going – three things Mondoux has in spades for her students and her colleagues. 

“She’s always my first stop when you’re talking about something challenging,” Sheehy says. “I don’t think I’ve ever stopped by her office and she hasn’t taken the time [to talk]. She almost never seems to have something else to do, which cannot be true.”

It’s hard to say where Mondoux finds the time. In addition to her teaching and research, she is also a mother of two teenagers, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a catechist at her parish, working with preschoolers, kindergarteners and first graders. And, yet, Sheehy says that Mondoux holds evening office hours for her students, raises her hand for anything the department needs and participates in nearly every mission-based program the College offers. And she makes each area of her life feel like she has all the time in the world for them. 

Being generous with her time is something she learned from her Ph.D. adviser Zakian, and a quality Mondoux highlights as important to being a mentor. Another is recognizing that even as a teacher, she is also always learning.

“One of the most important things to learn as a person, but also as a teacher, is that not everyone is like you. People can be not like you in really wonderful ways,” she says. “Every student I have teaches me to be a better mentor, because each of them is different from each other.” 

Mondoux says she is constantly reflecting on what she’s learned, what has – or hasn’t – worked, what she can do better, and who has helped her along the way.

“Just like students don’t learn in a vacuum, I don’t do this work in a vacuum,” she notes. “The things I do in the classroom and in the research lab are built on years upon years of my own mentors, my colleagues at Holy Cross, the students who have come through my classes and the lab, and all the folks who’ve helped me think about mission. It is a lot of people and a lot of contributions, both large and small, that all lead to who I am as a person. They lead to who I am as a teacher, and they lead to who I am as a researcher.”

Mondoux’s self-reflective nature is also tied to another area close to her heart: the Holy Cross mission. She does her job “on purpose,” she explains, and that means making sure her students understand why what they’re doing matters and how it fits into the bigger picture of the world. 

“How we want to approach the world is how we want to approach cell biology,” she says. “When you approach something with a sense of purpose, it’s more meaningful, and therefore you can get more out of it.” 

On the first day of every class, Mondoux introduces the College’s mission and how it relates back to what the students will be learning that semester. She explains the implications course content has on actual health conditions. When giving examples, she uses real data and images from published scientific papers. 

“It’s a lot more messy and harder to interpret, but part of what that does is ground what we’re doing in real life. These things are really happening inside of us, all the time,” she explains. “They aren’t just words. They mean something. They have real consequences for real people.”

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(Clockwise from left) With husband, Nate Hafer, and their sons, Henry and Jack, in 2016 after Hafer ran the Crusaders Against Cancer 5K; with Hafer during grad school in 2005; Mondoux with her children and parents after delivering her Burns Medal address.

“IN PRAISE OF THE MIDDLE” 

In 2023, Mondoux was awarded the College’s Donal J. Burns ’49 Career Teaching Medal, which recognizes an outstanding faculty member who has devoted their lifetime to teaching at Holy Cross. Nominated by colleagues and students, the winner is announced annually at the provost’s spring address, where the person’s career and accomplishments are detailed without identifying the recipient until the last sentence. Sheehy was sitting just a few seats down from Mondoux on May 10, 2023, when she was announced as the winner: “It was really clear that it was her, and she was shocked. I’m, like, ‘What are you talking about? They just described you exactly.’ She was really just overcome and floored.”

Burns Medal winners deliver a speech at the provost’s fall address, an opportunity that left an impact on Mondoux — and the audience.

“In her highly energetic and motivational speech, Michelle inspired a palpable excitement among the crowd while talking about her personal journey working with students,” says Rob Bellin, professor of biology and one of Mondoux’s close colleagues. “That journey led to her central guiding goal as a teacher: that every student in each of her courses has the opportunity for success. As a fellow long-term college teacher, I’d never heard a more compelling case for the importance of inclusive excellence.”

“Giving that Burns lecture was one of the highlights of my life. My parents were there, my husband and kids were there, and I was talking about things that were so important to me,” Mondoux recalls. “To be honored in that way out of all the amazing professors we have at Holy Cross, it would be hard to overstate how important, how meaningful that was to me. That was one of the best days of my life.”

She aptly titled her lecture “In Praise of the Middle,” acknowledging that “the practice of teaching is a life’s work that cannot be perfected.”

Neither can life itself. It’s constantly changing, and there’s always something new to learn, she reminds: “It’s not just learning. It’s figuring out what you have to learn. Because in the rest of our lives, nobody gives us a syllabus and tells us these are the things you need to know.

“It’s just a whole bunch of great teaching experiments,” she continues. “Teaching is for sure an experimental discipline. But life is an experimental discipline. So you’ve got to try and you’ve got to be empowered to do it, and then do it again.”