| Outcome/accomplishment:
Experience is said to be the best teacher, but even better is hands-on-experience
while partnered with a teacher and drawing a salary. That’s the basic
premise behind iCLEM, the Introductory College Level Experience in Microbiology
program. Aimed at bright, underprivileged high school students, iCLEM
is an eight-week paid summer internship in which students and teachers
from the San Francisco Bay Area work side-by-side in a state-of-the art
microbiology laboratory on a research project related to bioenergy.
In summer 2010 the NSF-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center
(SynBERC), headquartered at UC Berkeley, doubled iCLEM’s reach to six students.
The number of students is relatively small because iCLEM is an intensive,
and expensive, program that focuses considerable resources in an individualized
way on each student.
Impact/benefits:
SynBERC launched iCLEM at the University of California at Berkeley in 2008,
as an introduction to potential research and academic careers. The program
is part of the Center’s efforts to train a new, diverse cadre of engineers
for the synthetic biology field who can also serve as “evangelists” to
educate the public about its benefits and risks. The intensive, hands-on
program targets low-income, motivated students – each of whom was accepted
to college after the program – and provides training to several teachers
who can bring what they learned back to the classroom.
Explanation/ background:
Students participate in a summer research project in the state-of-the-art
Keasling biofuels lab in Emeryville, California (Dr. Jay Keasling is the
Director of SynBERC), receiving instruction in microbiology, molecular
biology, and biochemistry, and participating in a real-world research project.
Teachers Saber Khan and Rowan Brown Driscoll gained experience in state-of-the-art
lab techniques and learned more about what goes into becoming a professional
in those scientific fields.
The iCLEM curriculum includes
field trips to San Francisco Bay area biotech companies and research universities,
as well as lectures from leading scientists at SynBERC and its partner
the Joint BioEnergy Institution (JBEI), whose mission is to advance the
development of the next generation of biofuels derived from the solar energy
stored in plant biomass. At iCLEM, students improve their communication
skills by preparing their data for publication, maintaining lab logs, writing
reports, and preparing scientific posters. They also develop a résumé,
write a statement of purpose, research colleges, meet with admissions officers,
and visit college campuses.
Including several teachers
in the program acts as a multiplier effect for its reach to students.
Khan plans to use his experiences with techniques and experimental design
to recreate this summer’s research activities in his own middle school
science classes. With Driscoll, Khan is developing protocols and
lesson plans to enable motivated teachers from resource-limited schools
to do the same. Their collaboration is resulting in a “how-to” website
for teachers that will explain how to run a gel, where to buy cheap reagents,
and how to put lab research into a pedagogical context for students.
“We look to provide an opportunity
that could make a critical difference in the lives of students who are
from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and have little or no family
history of college attendance,” says Clem Fortman, a post-doctoral researcher
in metabolic engineering with JBEI’s Fuels Synthesis Division who co-founded
iCLEM three years ago with James Carothers, another post-doc with appointments
at both JBEI and SynBERC.
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