Several Buford Middle School seventh and eighth graders leaned in to see where Wisam Fares’ finger was pointing on a computer image of lab-grown cancer cells. The cells were stained with dye and magnified with a special microscope big enough to see the DNA in their nuclei.
“What do you think happened here, just recently?” said Fares, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia.
“The cell divided to make another copy,” volunteered eight-grader Cayden Roach.
“Exactly!” said a delighted Fares, smiling even more broadly when Roach’s classmate, Sean Daly, correctly named the process: mitosis.
The eighth graders are two of 11 students participating this spring in Buford Biomedical Investigators, a STEM outreach initiative run by UVA BME students as an afterschool club at the Charlottesville public school. Fares was showing a group of them BME professor Kevin Janes’ lab during a field trip to the UVA Department of Biomedical Engineering. He works in Janes’ lab, studying how changes in cell receptors influence the way cancer cells communicate and behave, with the ultimate goal of finding better treatments.
After school each Thursday from February to May, the Buford Biomedical Investigators learned about topics such as cardiovascular diseases, immune engineering and biomechanics in hands-on learning activities led by UVA graduate and undergraduate students. Now in its second year, more than two dozen students have come through the program.
The May 13 field trip was designed to connect concepts learned in the activities to real research. The middle schoolers rotated in small groups through the research labs of Janes, associate professor Donald Griffin and assistant professor Sameer Bajikar, with graduate students serving as their guides.
The students took turns looking through microscopes, asking questions, and learning how graduate student researchers replicate DNA, or make injectable hydrogel beads called “microgels” that might one day re-grow tissue damaged by injury or disease.
Timing it Right
“A lot of what we’re doing is instilling confidence that these students can be successful in a science, technology, engineering or math field. That idea transcends biomedical engineering to apply to any STEM field,” said Ph.D. candidate Kareem El-Ghazawi, who conceived the program and co-founded it with Fares.
El-Ghazawi said he wished he’d had earlier exposure to research because he didn’t always feel that confidence, even in college. Now he is a year away from earning his Ph.D., with professor and BME department chair Shayn Peirce-Cottler as his adviser.
El-Ghazawi and Fares both know the country needs more talented people trained in STEM to solve big problems.
“We targeted middle school because that’s the age you start hearing ‘Oh, I’m not good at math,’” Fares said. “And they’re not saying, ‘math is hard’ or ‘I can get better at it,’ they’re saying, ‘I’m not a math person.’”
“This age is early enough to where you can change that perception,” El-Ghazawi said, noting students are harder to convince by the time they reach high school age.
“I love this program,” Peirce-Cottler said. “The way Kareem and Wisam relate concepts to solving real life medical problems while making it fun for the students is really important. It shows the very best parts of being a biomedical engineer — that through teamwork, creativity and passion we create solutions and innovations that help sick people and improve lives.”
“Showing middle school students they are capable of having such impact on the world at this stage in their education motivates them to take courses in high school, like engineering and calculus, that they might not otherwise sign up for,” she said.
Built to Last
Year two of Buford Biomedical Investigators featured all new activities so the curriculum can alternate each year. That gives seventh graders the option of attending for two years and creates infrastructure for future generations of BME student instructors.
For El-Ghazawi and Fares, it is important to leave behind a program that will be around for years to come. Both are leaders in UVA’s Graduate Biomedical Engineering Society, which runs the program. This year, they received funding to further develop the program from the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Community Outreach initiative.
Mitosis aficionados Roach and Daly both came back for the second run. They have a long time to plan careers, but Roach can envision a future in biomedical engineering, especially the idea of modifying DNA to find cures for diseases. Daly enjoyed the program as a way to explore a career field that was previously unknown to him.
“It is a great opportunity to try new things,” Daly said. “There are so many fun, hands-on activities and the UVA people are great.”
“A hundred percent, it was really fun,” Roach said.