The Science Education Partnership initiative at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) has focused for the most part on a program called Regional Biotech. Regional Biotech was established in 2001 as a regional biomedical learning laboratory at UTPA for use by middle/high school students and teachers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) region of South Texas. Scientists and educators at Regional Biotech provide a targeted student population and teachers a series of coordinated inquiry-based biotechnology learning modules that impart practical laboratory experience. We also utilize medical laboratory science modules to complement the biotechnology experiments. The National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) has generously supported Regional Biotech through a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) since 2001. We seek continuation funding for use in maintaining the excellence of Regional Biotech. The overall goal of our proposed phase II project is to widely disseminate our pilot-tested Biotechnology/Medical Laboratory Science loan program and to expand our greatly successful on-campus Biotechnology/Medical Laboratory Science training activities. Regional Biotech will assemble 5 packages of portable state-of-the art laboratory equipment sets that will be dispatched on loan together with experiment modules to participating schools. We will also fully implement our on-campus Biotechnology/Medical Laboratory Science training activities to include 5th grade students who are now required to take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test in science. The proposed activities of Regional Biotech will result in the improvement of the student and the teacher's understanding of the health sciences and benefit a wide audience of underrepresented groups in science, including women and minorities.
