2018 NOVA Fall Lab Tours
This month, as a part of NOVA’s annual Fall Lab Tours, we hosted 18 high school seniors from the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy. For this event, students are brought to our campus for one day to learn about the research we do by attending lab demonstrations and short lectures. At this local Baltimore City school, students choose a specialized biomedical pathway at the end of their sophomore year. Such pathways include nursing, pharmacy, EMT, dental, and in the case of the students that visited us, biomedical sciences. Here, students explore topics such as physiology, genetics, and public health through classwork, hands-on experience, and on-site visits to hospitals and research institutions.
This year, NOVA invited the seniors in this pathway to our campus in order to give them a taste of the research going on in our institution and give them a sense of what it’s like to be an academic scientist. Eight labs across UMB gave 20-minute demonstrations of their research. Students got to observe science ranging from super high resolution imaging of neurons in the Blanpied lab, to rat behavior and fiber photometry in the Cheer lab, to histological analysis of aortic aneurisms in the Strickland lab. In addition to the lab tours, the high school students had a pizza lunch and heard presentations from grad students about academic life and the various pathways they took to get to grad school. Additionally, students met a representative from Senator Chris Van Hollen’s office, who was here to observe and partake in our Lab Tours event. On behalf of NOVA, thank you to the Blanpied, Bloch, Calu, Chang, Cheer, Mathur, Strickland, and Thompson labs for taking the time to design and give these demonstrations.
Sam Bacharach
