Outreach
Opportunities for underrepresented minority students
The Center for Modular Biology supports 7-10 underrepresented minority undergraduates to participate in the summer research internship in the Harvard systems biology community. More information about this internship can be found at the internship website.
Opportunities for High School Teachers
Lecture Series for Teachers
Fall 2009
During the fall of 2009, the Harvard University Center for Modular Biology co-sponsored a lecture series for high school Biology teachers. Two of the Centers’ fellows: Daniel Needleman and Pardis Sabeti presented talks. Dr. Needleman discussed his research and the challenges of working at the interface between physics and biology during a lecture entitled “Cell Biology and Active Liquid Crystals.” Dr. Sabeti discussed her research on the effects of natural selection on the human genome in a lecture entitled, "Natural Selection in the Human Lineage." Lively question and answer sessions with the attending teachers followed both lectures, enabling teachers to further clarify key points to share with their own students. Both lectures will be available for viewing online in the coming months. Following the lectures, teachers were brought to the Center for Modular Biology and given tours of the laboratories of Dr. Allan Drummond, Dr. Sudha Rajamani and Dr. Ryan Hill. These tours provided the teachers with an opportunity to learn firsthand about the research happening at the Center.
Fall 2010
This coming fall, the Harvard University Center for Modular Biology will welcome over 50 teachers to their facility for a lecture series focused on “The Biology of Diversity.” The goal of this series is to provide teachers with access to cutting edge research in a manner that can be easily adapted for their own classroom teaching. Teachers will attend lectures, participate in laboratory activities and tours, and eat dinner along with graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from the center. The focus of these lectures will be Biodiversity will be three-fold and explore diversity through the lenses of evolution, disease pathogens and personal genetics. Lectures will take place in the new lecture hall of the Northwest Building. Laboratory activities will take place in the new undergraduate teaching laboratory facilities.
Applications for this program will be available online beginning in August.
Summer Teacher Program Exploring Biodiversity
During July, the Harvard University Center for Modular Biology will be co-sponsoring a two-week program that will provide eighteen high school biology teachers with a window into current research in biodiversity, and will enable each teacher to develop a meaningful classroom lesson that incorporates current technology. In addition, teachers will be paired with graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from the Center to develop online learning modules. The program’s first week will consist of presentations by Harvard faculty members who conduct research in areas relevant to biodiversity, conservation and systems biology, several laboratory activities, and instruction in multimedia software. Teachers will also take part in a workshop exploring the ethics of personal genetics. During the second week, teachers will receive further software instruction where necessary but will focus on developing individual curriculum projects and working collaboratively to design classroom animations. All materials generated by teachers in this program will be available online for other teachers to access and use in their own classrooms.
Summer Bioinformatics Workshop
On Saturday July 10, 2010 the Harvard University NIGMS Center for Modular Biology will be co-sponsoring a tutorial, "Teaching bioinformatics in high school biology courses." This half-day tutorial (8:30 AM to 12:30 PM) is followed by a networking lunch (12:30 PM - 1:30 PM). The tutorial is being offered during the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) annual meeting. Full scholarships are being made available for 25 teachers. The other co-sponsor for the event is The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The goal of this tutorial is educate high school biology and chemistry teachers who want to use bioinformatics exercises to support their curricula. Instructors will offer strategies for teaching bioinformatics at the high school level, including examples of student’s work. They will also present concrete examples of "hands-on" exercises for students that have been designed to insert readily into current high school biology curricula and correlate with the Massachusetts State Biology Standards. Teachers attending this tutorial will leave with access to these classroom-tested exercises, suitable for a variety of student levels.
Additional information can be found at http://www.iscb.org/ismb2010-program/ismb2010-tutorials
Laboratory and Center tours
Upon request, tours are scheduled for small groups of students accompanied by their teachers for the Northwest Core Facility and Individual Research Laboratories. These tours provide students with an opportunity to meet researchers and staff at the center, learn about research projects happening in a wide variety of disciplines and gain exposure and insight into the careers of research scientists.
Opportunities for High School Students
Spring Laboratory Workshops for Students
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) supported Center for Modular Biology at Harvard will be hosting two laboratory opportunities for high school science students. These laboratories will introduce students from local high schools to the technologies being used to explore questions related to the Biology of Diversity. In each of the three-hour laboratory sessions, a teaching fellow group consisting of graduate students, staff and postdoctoral fellows from the Center will instruct students. Laboratory sessions will be offered during the first two weeks of April. Sessions are three hours in length open to classes from public, private and charter schools. Teachers from high schools in New England (MA, RI, NH and ME) are encouraged to apply online from October 1st through December 20th for the following spring’s program. Plasmid Technology Laboratory: There are three main goals for students participating in the
Plasmid technology laboratory:
To understand what restriction enzymes do and why they are important tools in modern molecular biology.
To learn how gel electrophoresis works.
To understand the basic laboratory process that can identify an individual based upon a sample of DNA.
Students will be given an unknown piece of bacterial DNA (a plasmid) and use restriction enzymes to determine which one it is out of three possible types of plasmid DNA. Discussion during the laboratory will focus on the applications of this technology to areas of research at the Center and its applicability to the students’ lives.
Antibiotic Resistance Laboratory:
There are four main goals for students participating in the Antibiotic Resistance laboratory:
To understand antibiotic resistance.
To learn basic microbiology procedures including sterile technique.
To understand what restriction enzymes do and why they are important tools in modern microbiology.
To understand the basic mathematical models used to predict antibiotic resistance by mutation-driven selection.
During this laboratory, students will be setting up restriction digests of unknown plasmid DNA, screening for antibiotic resistance and using gel electrophoresis to analyze the products of their digests. Discussion during the laboratory will focus on the role of humans in driving antibiotic resistance and the specific research laboratories at the Center exploring this issue. Spring Student Internships - Pilot Program Two students are currently participating in a pilot internship program the Harvard Center for Modular Biology. Expanding the internship program to include high school students will further allow the Center to share its resources with students interested in pursuing careers in science. Working under the direction of Dr. Marcus Kronforst, these interns are learning important techniques in systems biology and laboratory research skills. These internships will culminate in the creation of posters that will be presented to faculty, staff and the public at the students’ schools. These are unpaid internships.
Additional Information about all programs can be obtained by e-mailing Tara Bennett tbennett@fas.harvard.edu
