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“Neuroscience isn’t part of the standard high school curriculum, but every year we meet students who are interested in neuroscience because it synthesizes their interest in biology, chemistry, physics and math and is connected to so many topics they care about, from mental health to creativity,” said Brain Bee organizer Erik Herzog, the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences.

Harsh Moolani founded Create Circles as an undergrad. The nonprofit that pairs older adults with college students is now a national organization with some 700 volunteers in 33 states.

High schoolers have many opportunities to work with Arts & Sciences faculty members, conduct research, and take college-level courses — experiences that often go on to kickstart careers.

Washington University in St. Louis welcomed 54 students from the St. Louis region Feb. 25 for the first in-person St. Louis Area Brain Bee since the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants answered questions about the nervous system, brain structure, cognitive disorders and other topics in neuroscience.

The St. Louis area Brain Bee is back at Wash U this weekend. Watch this video to learn more.

Founded in 2008 by the master mathematician Prof. Shing-Tung Yau, the S.-T. Yau High School Science Award inspires scientific innovations and is designed for high school students all over the world. Advocating innovative thinking and collaborative spirits, the Award dispenses with paper-delivered test format or standardized test answers and instead gives students the opportunity to participate by submitting academic papers. The Award aims at promoting the development of science education in high schools, stimulating students’ research interests and innovative capabilities, as well as discovering and cultivating young talents in scientific disciplines.

All across the United States, half of the college students who plan to major in STEM switch fields. As STEM fields struggle to achieve diversity, faculty members are asking: how do we fix the exodus of students from STEM?

The ENDURE Program wrapped up summer 2022 with a symposium on August 4 in the Eric P. Newman Education Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The conference showcased the work of the 14 undergraduate scholars who pursued cutting-edge questions in neuroscience for 10 weeks over the summer.

Nine local teachers have been selected by Washington University in St. Louis faculty for the Summer Teacher-Researcher Partnership, an innovative initiative from the Institute for School Partnership. The teachers will work in university labs, where they will participate in faculty research and develop lessons for their classrooms.

May is one of seven members of the Washington University community who were honored April 19 at the Gerry and Bob Virgil Ethic of Service Awards, sponsored by the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement. Now in their 19th year, the awards celebrate leaders who are devoted to improving the St. Louis region. Among the honorees is Sophia Dutton, a junior studying cognitive neuroscience in Arts & Sciences, serves as co-president of Heart for the Unhoused, which works to increase health-care access for unhoused St. Louisans.

About 50 high school students from across St. Louis region gathered virtually Feb. 27 to test their knowledge of the brain and to learn about neuroscience research and careers at the St. Louis Area Brain Bee, an annual event hosted by Washington University in St. Louis. “We were thrilled to have such a diverse, motivated group of high school students join us to talk about brain science and give away some prizes,” said Erik Herzog, the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, who helped organize the Brain Bee along with members of Synapse, the university’s neuroscience student group.

Chalker, in collaboration with ISP, will focus on two objectives. First, to expand the activities of the program, they aim to reach populations traditionally underrepresented in science in the St. Louis area. ISP has already been working with these target populations for nearly 30 years. Second, they aim to incorporate more mathematics and computational thinking into the science curriculum.

Douglas Chalker, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a five-year $660,281 collaborative award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project titled “Expanding and Sustaining Hands-on Science in K-12 Classrooms Using Tetrahymena.”

Nearly 10 years into her teaching career, Daugs found herself back on a university campus this summer in the role of a hands-on learner. Through a teacher-researcher partnership initiative, Daugs, a 10th-grade chemistry teacher at Kirkwood High School, is logging 20 hours a week conducting authentic scientific research in chemistry and nanotechnology in the lab of Bryce Sadtler, assistant professor of chemistry. S

WUSTL ENDURE partners with groups across WashU and local institutions to improve diversity in the neuroscience field.

ENDURE students come from diverse backgrounds, including underserved minority groups and the LGBTQ+ community. Lori takes great pride in helping ENDURE students have the most comfortable and positive experience possible. She found that WashU has many resources for educating staff on diversity, equity, and inclusion awareness, and signed herself up for a class about pronoun use.

The event that high school students across the St. Louis metropolitan area get excited for each year, the St. Louis Area Brain Bee (SLABB) competition, took place online on March 27th, 2021. Rohan Rao, a junior at Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, Missouri, is the 2021 SLABB winner.

Graduate students in The Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB), Kari Miller, Elizabeth Haswell lab, and Ghiska Ramahdita, Guy Genin and Nathaniel Huebsch labs, have been named semifinalists in the 2021 Reach Out Science Slam Communication Challenge jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Museum of Science, Boston. Kari and Ghiska will be presenting original, three-minute science stories on their respective research in mechanobiology.

Agriculture is the No. 1 industry in Missouri. The state is home to 95,000 farms, according to the Missouri Department of Agriculture, covering two-thirds of the state’s total land acreage, with the top commodities being soybeans, corn, cattle, hogs, and turkeys. But despite this rich agricultural tradition, there remains a disconnect for some people about where their food comes from and the role agriculture plays in their lives.

MySci is a hands-on, inquiry-based science curriculum and professional development initiative created by the Institute for School Partnership at Washington University in St. Louis along with local elementary and middle school teachers. Students learn science by doing — blowing on kazoos to understand sound waves; playing with Slinkies to demonstrate energy transfer; stretching out knee highs to replicate the digestive system.

The Institute for School Partnership (ISP) at Washington University in St. Louis is developing a new strategic plan to support the university’s mission to be “In St. Louis, for St. Louis.” To that end, the institute has hired Nikki Doughty, head of school at City Academy and a regional leader in urban education, to serve as its first associate director of strategic initiatives.

The Institute for School Partnership (ISP) at Washington University in St. Louis has launched a comprehensive COVID-19 curriculum. The free unit boasts both synchronous and asynchronous elements and helps students understand the history of infectious disease, the nature of COVID-19, the power and limitations of modeling and the importance of scientific literacy.

As a collaboration between the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) Institute for School Partnerships (ISP) and the Synapse Scholars program, the Sheep Brain Dissection was one of the numerous mentorship opportunities Synapse provided to local elementary, middle and high schools in the surrounding St. Louis community.

By 2022, employment in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) in the St. Louis region is projected to grow by 12.4%, according to the most recent State of St. Louis Workforce report focused on STEM. But St. Louis employers are struggling to fill these positions.

The Institute for School Partnership introduced STEM Challenges in May to keep STEM learning going for the tens of thousands of homebound students in the St. Louis area. These are fun, easy STEM activities kids can do using typical household items. Cognizant of the digital divide in the region, the ISP partnered with The Little Bit Foundation to distribute free STEM kits and materials to families alongside their school-based drive-thru meal service programs.

Efforts include weekly science lessons on the Nine Network, free STEM activities and supplies

The advice was simple and blunt: “Stop stressing out and focus on what you love.” Washington University in St. Louis senior Harsh Moolani was skeptical. As a pre-med student, Moolani believed he needed to pack his resume with clubs, activities and academic accolades. Then he considered the source: a remarkable woman with a successful career, good friends — and a few months to live. The two had become close at a local hospice, where Moolani was a volunteer and she was dying of Parkinson’s disease.

Stagnant scores, frustrated students, daunted educators — such is the state of math education across the nation and in the region. That’s why the Institute for School Partnership (ISP) at Washington University in St. Louis is introducing Math314, an innovative professional development program that will improve math instruction and boost student enthusiasm and scores.

Volunteers from the Strassmann Queller Lab including faculty, postdocs, grad and undergrad students, have been bringing science to the community through games and demonstrations at Ferguson Farmer’s market the first Saturday of each month (spring, summer and fall) for more than a year.

A mySci elementary curriculum unit, "From Sun to Food," has earned the highest award from Achieve, a national science curriculum rating organization, becoming the first K-5 unit in the nation to do so. MySci is led by Victoria May, executive director of the Institute for School Partnership and assistant dean in Arts & Sciences, and Jeanne Norris serves as curriculum coordinator.

Congratulations to junior Aiyana Evers, of St Genevieve High School, who was recently chosen for the High School Apprenticeship Program (HSAP) sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO). Through this program, high school juniors and seniors are offered an authentic science and engineering research experience alongside university researchers. Aiyana will spend two months as an apprentice in Dr. Arpita Bose’s Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis!

Think back to your elementary and middle school science experiences. What were you taught? How were you taught? Chances are, you may not remember much about science in your elementary school. In middle school, you might remember your textbook and taking turns reading the textbook out loud in class. Maybe you remember the occasional egg-drop challenge or microscope lab. Imagine, for a moment, a child who will have science memories of algae photobioreactors, penguin habitats, toy design, solving the mystery of pollinator disappearance, flood levees, pizza farms, erosion windbreaks, and space missions. What would be possible for a child who has a rigorous, relevant science experience starting from kindergarten to eighth grade?

Victoria May, assistant dean of Arts & Sciences and executive director of the Institute for School Partnership, was awarded $325,000 from Monsanto in support of scaling up the MySci program, which equips elementary school teachers with instructional materials and professional development opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math. May also received a $50,000 grant from the Bellwether Foundation to support STEM education.

There was cake, balloons and a rousing singalong of Happy Birthday. The man himself – Charles Darwin – stood off in a corner ready to pose for selfies. A birthday hat sitting atop his head.

A swarm of competitors from across the St. Louis region tested their brain power at Washington University’s 9th annual St. Louis Area Brain Bee, held Feb. 16 on the Danforth Campus.

Jenny Shoots, a graduate student in the Haswell Lab, has worked with a group of volunteers in the Ville neighborhood of North St. Louis at Claver House for two years. For the past year, every Saturday morning the volunteer group hosts a Read and Feed program for young people in the neighborhood where kids can enjoy a pancake breakfast and take part in educational activities that promote literacy. The program has expanded from reading to other types of experiences promoting scientific learning. There are about 10-20 regulars that come every week excited to learn new things.

Researchers are creating their own podcasts on topics ranging from exoplanets to graduate-student finances.

The 2019 St. Louis Area Brain Bee is set for 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, February 16, at Washington University’s Danforth Campus. Herzog works with undergraduate and graduate students to formulate the Brain Bee questions. He also taps into his archives, recycling questions from prior years. And for the first time, the Society for Neuroscience, which sponsors the national and international Brain Bee competitions, will provide 100 standardized questions which Herzog is free to use. The competition, open to high school and homeschool students in grades 9-12, starts with a written exam. The top 10 finishers then move on to an oral round, which resembles a spelling bee where students take turns answering questions about the brain and nervous system.

“As an instructor, I try to teach how the topic has relevance from different approaches in biology,” said Erik Herzog, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. Herzog teaches undergraduate biology courses at the university. His lab uses a variety of techniques to study the cellular and molecular basis of circadian rhythms, biological clocks that drive near 24-hour rhythms in living beings including animals and plants.

"We must encourage interest in science and math subjects without surprise or foreboding and empower young girls to pursue these interests in multiple facets of their academic and extracurricular lives. If we can connect young girls’ aptitude for STEM subjects to their personal ability to succeed in these fields in the future and share our hope to increase numbers of women in STEM, they will hear how much their talents are needed."

As Tyson Humanities Fellows, Kit Lord and Hayley Huntley spent three months at the university's environmental field station, embedding with the Tyson community to explore the human side of science. After conducting hundreds of hours of interviews, the fellows, led by environmental humanities lecturer Suzanne Loui, profiled the people who make Tyson a thriving research ecosystem. Here, Lord details their collaborative interview project, Humans of Tyson.

From the playground to the pool to the ballpark, science is all around us. Through Everyday MySci activities, the Institute for School Partnership at Washington University in St. Louis helps parents nurture their child’s natural sense of curiosity, wonder and discovery.