IV. Outreach One of the major outreach activities at CMB is the fellows program itself: the fellows'daily involvement with a group of colleagues from a wide variety of backgrounds has fundamentally changed their outlook on science, and will make them powerful advocates for and leaders of interdisciplinary science at the institutions they join. Our external advisory board seconded this opinion: """"""""The fellows will both shape and be shaped by the Bauer Center. They come with great strengths in one or two fields, but because of their interactions with each other, they will leave with much wider knowledge, expertise, and connections. When they take faculty positions, they will play important roles in building collaborative research programs in systems biology. Because most of them will do so at other institutions, they will contribute to the national growth of this field."""""""" Summer school. Over the last 4 years we have supported 31 students from quantitative backgrounds to attend the Physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (http://courses.mbl.edu/phvsiology/) as """"""""Scholars of the NIGMS-funded Harvard Center for Modular Biology"""""""" (see Appendix 4). Despite its name (which is unalterable since the course has been in existence since 1892), this course has been revamped by Ron Vale and Tim Mitchison into a systems biology course in which half the students come from biological backgrounds and half come from engineering, mathematics, physics or other quantitative sciences. This course is providing exactly the kind of meeting place for biologists and quantitative scientists that our Center tries to foster within and outside Harvard. One student (a chemical physicist) called the course """"""""an indescribably wonderful experience"""""""", and """"""""a learning experiment, where biologists and physicists come together to teach each other their craft and learn about classes of problems and methods of solution previously unknown."""""""" """"""""I found it extremely interesting to see how you can combine knowledge/methods from different scientific areas like physics and biology and extract new information from the system"""""""" (Alexandra Zidovska, 07). Lenny Dawidowicz, the MBL Director of Education, said (see letter of support on page 213):"""""""" We see the MBL Physiology Course as the spark that starts the engine. The Center for Systems Biology at Harvard keeps this running with continued input and improvements,.."""""""". The interaction of the Center and the Physiology course and its ability to transform young scientists is nicely illustrated by Daniel Needleman, who did graduate work on the physics of microtubules, was supported by NIGMS funds to attend the Physiology course in 2004, used a mixture of biological and physical techniques as a post-doctoral fellow, and will join the Center as junior faculty in the summer 2008. Summer internship. In the last two years, outreach to non-Harvard communities and underrepresented minorities has become the driving force behind the summer research internship;about one third of the students are now from underrepresented minorities and half are non-Harvard students. The undergraduate internship and the interdisciplinary training at our Center is an ideal conduit for introducing students from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds to a career in research and we will build on the positive experience of the last two years in our future outreach activities (see Planned Outreach for more details). High School Outreach. In the last two years of our NIGMS Center grant we have explored High School outreach activities. Two fellows and their labs taught several practical lab courses to students and their teachers from local urban high schools in a program organized by Rob Lue from the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology (10-15 students per 2 hour class, so far total of 50 students). The response from the students and teachers was overwhelmingly positive: """"""""It was a fantastic experience for my AP Biology students?for most of them it was the highlight of the course. I was very impressed with how well you had prepared everything for our lab, and with your presentation about it... Coming there also exposed {the students} to a research environment. As a teacher who wants to encourage my students'interest in the field of biology, I enjoyed seeing your enthusiasm for the research you are doing, and this impressed the students as well"""""""" (Susan Fleck, see letters of support, page 214). This High School outreach program will be expanded this fall with 6 fellows teaching lab courses and 4 fellows running tours through the Center for High School teachers. Projects like this give a better feel for science to substantial numbers of students but we believe they must be complemented by more intensive efforts that allow individual students to do concentrated, independent research projects that convince some of them to pursue careers in research. Our efforts began with Kevin Verstrepen (a Bauer Fellow) supervising Courtney Fiske from the Phillips Academy in her science project. Her letter (attached in Appendix 8) describes her experiences: """"""""I have not only gained a more nuanced perspective of biology, but also an increased appreciation for scientific discovery. Any student can memorize facts from a book;yet, the ability to make one's own discoveries is truly special"""""""". This year we are extending this effort to a group of underprivileged students in Jersey City by funding Juliet Girard, a recently graduated minority student from Harvard, in her efforts to expand a successful science magnet program at urban high schools. Juliet participated in this program when she was a high school student, which led her to a Westinghouse Science prize, undergraduate research, and admission to graduate programs at UCSF (which she will attend in fall 2008), Berkeley, and Rockefeller. Juliet will work with the Science Research Programs in four public high schools in Jersey City, whose total enrollment is about 7,000 total students. The goal is to extend the success of the Science Research Programs at one of the schools (Dickinson High School) to the other programs. The Dickinson program reaches 50 students (sophomores, juniors, and seniors), is over 10 years old, and its students have succeeded at local, state, and national high school science competitions including the Hudson County Science Fair, the Rutgers Symposium, the New Jersey Academy of Sciences, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), and the Siemens- Westinghouse Competition. The program introduces students to independent scientific inquiry through independent science research projects. Before starting their projects, students take an introductory class that teaches them the basics of the scientific method, doing library research, experimental design, scientific writing, and statistical analysis. Students perform their projects at home, or at local universities and must present their projects at the Hudson County Science Fair and are encouraged to present at other science competitions. Juliet will work 2 days a week at Dickinson supporting its founder, Michael Corcoran, by consulting with students about their projects and experimental design, editing scientific papers, and helping to run the Program. She will spend one day a week at each of the other three high schools informing their science teachers about the goals of the Science Research Program and working with them to develop their individual versions of this program. She will devise methods to share information and teaching resources, including inclass exercises, library research tools, textbooks, online resources for information and project ideas, funding sources, summer internship opportunities, grading rubrics, lesson plan ideas, and communication with the Hudson County Science Fair.
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