This year our team reached out to the community by educating middle-and-high school aged girls on the tools used in synthetic biology. We hope to help future scientists get involved at an early age and promote gender diversity. We feel it is important to help educate the next generation of women in science by giving them the opportunity to work with DNA and learn the principles of synthetic biology at a young age.

U of M hosts an annual summer camp called GISE (Girls In Science and Engineering) aimed at getting middle school aged girls involved with science. We collaborated with GISE by leading a camp session on synthetic biology. Our time with the middle schoolers and high schoolers not only allowed the girls to get a look into what studying science in college entails, it also gave our team members experience mentoring the girls, a win-win in the end. We helped the campers extract DNA from strawberries and bananas, compare the yield of DNA, and hypothesize what could cause the difference in yield. The girls were also able to make necklaces out of their own DNA, following a cheek swab and DNA isolation.

We received outstanding feedback from the campers, many of whom were repeat campers from previous years. Some of the girls who attended the camp several years ago, are now prospective team members for our team next year and have attended our practice presentations for the conference in Boston. We feel that this in itself is a great sign that our work with the girls is spreading the word on synthetic biology and building interest in the team.