Presidential Award goes to UCSF high school internship program hosting CIRM-supported students

Last summer CIRM sponsored high school students to carry out stem cell research at five California universities in association with existing high school internship programs at those schools. Yesterday we learned that President Obama likes our choice of partner programs — the UCSF program that included six CIRM-supported students received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. That award to the Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) High School Internship Program comes with a $25,000 grant.

The SEP program is focused on drawing students from disadvantaged backgrounds and giving them experiences that will help them succeed in college. In a press release, UCSF described their students:

The program works closely with San Francisco high school science teachers to identify students from disadvantaged backgrounds with significant potential. For example, the majority of high school interns come from families where neither parent has completed college. The education outcomes of students who participate in the internship program far exceed that of their peers - 92 percent matriculate to college, 76 percent complete Bachelor's degrees in the sciences, and 87 percent pursue post-baccalaureate degrees.

Congratulations to the UCSF team, and to the outstanding students who have gone through the program.

CIRM science officer Mani Vessal led the high school internship program for CIRM. The awards—called Creativity Awards—encourage participants to carry out research in an additional field unrelated to stem cell research. He said:

It really does foster creativity to have a mulitlinear approach to learning as opposed to just a single dimensional one. We're hoping to get the next generation of stem cell scientists who can think outside the box.

This short video features Ben Koo, the Academic Coordinator for the SEP program, and Creativity Award students from the UCSF and other programs talking about their research projects.
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After last summer's success, CIRM is expanding our Creativity Awards program for next summer. The request for applications just got posted to our website.

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High school students get stem cell experience in California labs

UC Davis interns Rex Reyes, Jaskaran Dhillon, Thomas Gepts and Kalani Ratnasiri

Last week CIRM gathered together the Creativity Award interns to learn about their summer projects. These high school students came from UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara and Stanford to congregate at the Children's Hospital Oakland, home of CIRM board member Bert Lubin.



The goal of the awards was to give high school students experience in research labs, and to encourage those students to think broadly about science with the idea that novel therapies will come from creative thinking. The students all carried out additional projects in humanities or other areas of science. (We blogged about the program here.)



The students I met were incredible, and I'm apparently not the only person to think so. Charlie Casey at UC Davis did a story about the program quoting Jan Nolta, who directs the school's Institute for Regenerative Cures.

“These students truly exceeded our expectations,” said Jan Nolta, director of the UCD Institute for Regenerative Cures and a mentor for several of the students. “One of our other interns was so determined to learn about stem cell science that he traveled two hours from Vallejo and back each day to work in our Sacramento lab.

“All of these young people performed fabulously, and they represent a very bright future for science, particularly, I hope, in stem cell research.”

The Sacramento Bee wrote about the four UC Davis interns.

Program directors selected the students based on their award-winning presentations of biotechnology concepts on websites they designed for UCD's 2011 Teen Biotech Challenge.



The four took a course in the procedures and techniques of stem cell production with master's-degree students from California State University, Sacramento, and worked on individual projects with scientist mentors.

When I talked to Gerhard Bauer, who taught that master's-level course, he said the high school students held their own among those more senior students. It'll be a while before we know where these students end up. For now, it's exciting to see high school students—many from lower socioeconomic homes—get excited about college and about the potential for stem cell research.



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High school students get creative in California stem cell labs

Smarts, education and hard work will get you far, but the big leaps in science take something more -- creativity. That's the thinking behind an innovative CIRM-funded summer program that encourages the most creative high school students to spend time working in a stem cell lab.

The CIRM Creativity Awards recipients are meeting in Oakland today to share results of their internship programs. Each student combined stem cells and one other discipline -- engineering, chemistry, social sciences, ethics, music or other academic fields -- into a summer internship.

This year's pilot program sent high school students to work in labs at Stanford and at University of California campuses in San Francisco, Davis and Santa Barbara. One student from each school was nominated to give a short talk about their research during today's meeting.

CIRM has worked to create a pipeline of stem cell expertise in California by funding young faculty, graduate students, masters and undergraduate students, ensuring that California has the scientific talent to fill biotech jobs and create the next generation of stem cell therapies. This high school program reaches even further down that pipeline, making sure promising high school students get the experience they need to go to college and earn science degrees.

This program is CIRM's second to reach high school students. Last year we released a high school curriculum that teachers can download and use to teach students about stem cell research. Those modules are here.

CIRM President Alan Trounson has been especially supportive of this program. Trounson was among the first to succeed with in vitro fertilization and believes that innovation and creativity are key to developing new therapies. When CIRM first announced this program he said:

“These Creativity Awards encourage smart young people in California to bring fresh ideas into the stem cell research field,” said Alan Trounson, CIRM President. “We are not only supporting the next generation of stem cell scientists, we are promoting the kind of innovative thinking that leads to novel breakthroughs in science.“

We'll be releasing videos in the upcoming weeks of talks by these students and an overview of the program. 

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