Wendy Brown is a cheerleader for the Oakland Raiderettes, performing dance routines at football games for which she makes $5 an hour. But Brown thinks girls should be more interested in following her example into her other occupation: scientist. When she’s not shaking pompoms, Brown is earning her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of California Davis. That’s why she’s a member of the Science Cheerleaders, a group of women with big smiles and even bigger brains, who share an ambition to get young girls to think differently about careers in science and engineering.
Brown told Zack Seward of Onward, “Our ultimate goals are to inspire young people to be interested in science, specifically young girls, and to playfully challenge stereotypes.” The Science Cheerleaders, whose members also include professional cheerleaders for the Redskins, the Titans, and the Kansas City Chiefs who are studying and working in such fields as engineering, neuroscience, and pathology, performed at the half time of a recent Philadelphia 76ers game, where they were introduced with information about their research interests and led the crowd in a participatory science project.
Hilary Nicholson, a cheerleader who’s working toward a Ph.D. at Brown, told Seward, “I stand out on the court and they announce I’m a molecular pharmacology and physiology Ph.D. student, and I have my hair curled and I’m wearing a short suit and it doesn’t look like what they’re expecting. That polar opposite perception really drives the point home.” Three cheers for that!
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Tag: science
This Is the Brainiest Way to Inspire Young Scientists
When Stanford neurobiology professor William Newsome’s kids were in middle school, he had a smart idea. What better way to get young students interested in science than showing them some real preserved brains? Brain Day has been an annual event for more than twenty years now. On February 3 Stanford neuroscience students Ivan Millan and Sammy Katta packed up some brains at Newsome’s lab and took them to middle schools in Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
From its beginnings as a visit to one school, Brain Day has expanded to serve ten area middle schools. The graduate students ask the middle schoolers to be respectful of the brains that have been donated to science, and then they all get a chance to observe them. They compared human brains to the brains of monkeys, dogs, and sheep, and learned about their functions.
Amy Adams writes for Stanford News Service that one student was so inspired by Brain Day that he went on to study neuroscience in college. The student wrote to teacher Terry Noeth, “After adjusting to the awful smell of the brain slices, all I could think was: Woah. This strip of tissue used to be someone. This piece of brain used to think and love. I was so fascinated that I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to do something, anything, that related to the brain and how it makes us who we are.”
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When People Said Minorities Weren’t Interested in Science, This Guy Proved Them Wrong
When physicist and engineer Stephen Cox first began encouraging minority students to study science and technology more than two decades ago, he faced plenty of doubters. “Many of the people just refused to believe that people of color can be involved in science and technology at this level,” Cox told Matt Erikson of Drexel University. But Cox proved them wrong through fifteen years of work as the director of the Greater Philadelphia Region Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), an organization that brings together the resources of nine Philadelphia-area universities to provide outreach, mentoring, and encouragement for African American, Latino, and Native American students to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
The National Science Foundation-funded LSAMP has plenty to boast about, helping students earn 12,000 degrees in STEM fields since 1994, with 350 those being PhDs. According to LSAMP’s website, students nurtured by the organization earn more than 500 bachelor’s degrees each year. Cox believes part of the secret is recruiting students early in high school and encouraging them to take lab classes during their freshman year. LSAMP also focuses on introducing minority students to careers they might never have heard of. For his tireless work, Cox will receive the College-Level Promotion of Education award at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards in Washington, D.C. next month. Cox told Erikson, “The award thing is not as important to me. My reward is seeing students walk across the stage, dispelling any previous misconceptions.”
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Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?
In early January, roughly 100 Duke students did something most college students never want to do: They came back from winter break early. But they had a very good reason. Twelve undergraduate teams competed in a 48-hour challenge at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business to come up with innovative ways to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in both the U.S. and India. Their final proposals were full of inventive ideas, including a program where students would repair bicycles and a tutorial program where older students would teach younger students via video. But the first-place team went the extra mile, designing an online platform similar to Pinterest, called “STEM Pals,” which could help students gain STEM problem-solving skills while providing resources to teachers. STEM Pals would feature “lessons in a box,” kits with materials to create water filters, lamps or latrines, which could then be used to help needy neighborhoods near the schools. “We use these kits to spark an interest in project-based learning,” first-place team member Andrew De Donato told The Herald Sun. As its name suggests, the platform would also feature a pen-pal component, connecting schools in the U.S. with schools in India. De Donato and another winning-team member, Jenna Karp, said they would like to see STEM Pals come to life. The $1,500 in prize money awarded by Duke may help them do just that.
One Simple Change Can Help Fix Gender Disparity in Science
In science, bias can ruin an experiment. And it may also be behind the academic field’s gender disparity problem. Women earn roughly half of the graduate degrees in science and engineering in America, but only 20 percent of full professors in the sciences are women. It turns out that academic conferences, which can be key to advancing a scientist’s career, might be playing a big role. Researcher Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found that simply adding a woman to the planning committees for scientific conferences increased the number of women invited to speak by 72 percent compared to how many were invited when the organizers were all men. The presence of a woman on the planning committee also significantly reduced the instances of all-male conference sessions. Casadevall, chair of the planning committee for the American Society of Microbiology, told Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience, “My hope is that when people become sensitive to this, they will design convening teams that have gender diversity up front. If that is the case, we should see a significant increase [in female speakers] this year.”
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How Do You Fight Bacteria in the Food Supply?
Mike Saltzow, who runs the small sausage factory North Country Smokehouse in New Hampshire, is fighting to prevent a dreaded listeria bacteria outbreak by adding a spritz of spray containing virus particles to each batch of sausage. These particles, called bacteriophages, hunt, infect, and eliminate bacteria, but do not target people or animal cells. Doctors have been using bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections for decades, and though most continue to treat these illnesses with antibiotics, the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has encouraged new research into the uses of bacteriophages. Recently, scientists have begun to explore the potential of bacteriophages to prevent food-borne illnesses. Each year, about 3000 Americans die of food-borne illness, and 48 million become sick.
Teenage Scientist Invents Nuclear Devices for a Safer World
Are you ready to feel a bit…under-accomplished? Nevada 19-year-old Taylor Wilson aspires to develop clean nuclear fusion energy, and few who’ve met him doubt that he can do it. Wilson built his own nuclear reactor at age 14 in his parents’ garage, teaching himself the process by studying information on the Internet and learning from professors at Reno’s Davidson Academy, a public school for gifted students. Wilson is the youngest person to ever build a reactor, and since completing that project he’s built a series of inventions involving nuclear energy, including a method for making less expensive medical isotopes for cancer screening and a device that can detect weapons-grade plutonium at shipping ports, a feat that won him first prize at the Intel Science Fair. He’s currently working on designs for safer, smaller power plants that would not have meltdowns and other accidents. He’s skipping college to have more time to work on his inventions.