Massachusetts is home to the full ecosystem of life sciences—including our world class academic institutions and medical centers, a vibrant venture capital community, hundreds of biotech companies of all sizes, contract research and manufacturing organizations, and service organizations supporting the industry.
It is no wonder then that eleven years ago MassBio established the Massachusetts Biotechnology Foundation to promote biotechnology education and workforce development programs. Each year, the Foundation awards the Innovative School of the Year to highlight and honor a Massachusetts high school for distinguishing itself through exemplary innovative biotechnology educational programming.
(from left) Lance Hartford (MassBioEd), Renee Connolly (EMD Serono), Jason Henry (Norton High), Paula Beisheim (Norton High), Tanya Benoint (Norton High), Dr. Patricia Ansay (Norton Superintendent), Kady Ferguson (student)
This year, MassBioEd granted the award to Norton High School in Norton, MA. Since 2007, Norton High School has worked with MassBioEd in the BioTeach program. The school has successfully utilized their BioTeach grant to expand biotechnology courses to all of their students and provide elective courses in biotech, forensics and anatomy & physiology. Each year, over 175 students are provided instruction in biotechnology based lab experiences, culminating in a research project that focuses on life sciences careers.
Other highlights of the innovative Norton High program include:
Presentations by former students. This year presentations were made by former students currently studying STEM majors at MIT and Tufts.
Norton teachers acting as mentors to former graduates. Many former students are now enrolled in STEM majors at the local colleges.
Norton offering a Biotechnology elective course. Now in its fourth year, competition is high for seats in both the Honors Level and College Preparatory/Main Stream Level Biotechnology classes.
Curriculum including topics such as Bioethics, Forensics, and Biotechnology. Students assist in laboratory preparation of materials, serve as lab assistants, present and demonstrate laboratory skills to the Norton School Committee and complete a final project which includes researching biotechnology companies and colleges that offer biotechnology majors.
Student internships. This year the Science department’s student internship was awarded to a Biotechnology student who is working on developing new labs and activities with the teacher for this course. This student will also be focusing on a STEM major in college in the fall.
Actively participating in MassBioEd’s Life Science Career Development Initiative. Highlights included a “college hop” field trip bringing students to colleges that offer biotechnology programs/ majors, regular presentations by career professionals in the industry, students and teachers attending workshops and job shadows at local universities and biotechnology companies and one-third of students in the first two cohorts enrolling in STEM majors in college.
Speaking of education, the annual International BioGENEius Challenge will take place June 18th at the 2012 BIO International Convention in Boston, MA. The International BioGENEius Challenge is the premier competition for high school students that recognized outstanding research in biotechnology. Finalists will showcase their talent and research to a prestigious panel of expert biotech judges and will display their projects to approximately 15,000 Convention participants.
Dr. Jill Biden and U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will embark on a five-state “Community College to Career” bus tour to highlight innovative industry partnerships this week. The tour will begin on February 22 with a visit at Columbus State Community College before continuing to DG Medical.
Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden
At DG Medical, Dr. Biden and Secretary Solis will join BioOhio and Sinclair Community College officials to see first-hand the impact of a U.S. Department of Labor grant-funded biomedical training program led by BioOhio.
Launched in 2010, the three-year Ohio Bioworkforce Training Partnership aims to deliver training to 660 displaced or underemployed workers in declining industries for careers in Ohio’s growing bioscience industry. In addition, 40 incumbent workers will receive more advanced training to move into higher level jobs. Several DG Medical employees have completed training at Sinclair Community College, one of the program’s six college partners.
Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis, 25th United States Secretary of Labor
Last week, President Obama announced a new $8 billion Community College to Career Fund co-administered by the Department of Labor and Department of Education to forge new partnerships between community colleges and businesses to train two million workers with skills that will lead directly to jobs.
Dr. Biden, a community college instructor for 18 years, and Secretary Solis, who began her career in public service as a community college trustee, will highlight the unique role community colleges can play in creating a flexible, highly-skilled 21st-century workforce to help businesses meet the specific emerging needs in their regions.
American business leaders rue the lack of home-grown skilled workers. This is a problem governors and legislators have been acknowledging for years. However, a recent report from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute indicates that many states continue to ignore the need for strong science curriculums as a means of producing workers for an increasingly high-tech economy.
“American science performance is lagging as the economy becomes increasingly high tech, but our current science standards are doing little to solve the problem. Reviewers evaluated science standards for every state for this report and their findings were deeply troubling: The majority of states earned Ds or Fs for their standards in this crucial subject, with only six jurisdictions receiving As.”
Here’s another quote from the report that cuts right to the chase:
“The results of this rigorous analysis paint a fresh—but still bleak—picture. A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful. In fact, the average grade across all states is—once again—a thoroughly undistinguished C. (In fact, it’s a low C.) In twenty-seven jurisdictions, the science standards earn a D or below.”
If you have an hour and a half to kill it would be worthwhile to watch this presentation of the report’s findings:
Amidst the mountains of western North Carolina rests a stand of Sweetbay magnolia trees. This hardly sounds noteworthy, but this story gets interesting.
Sweetbay Magnolia Flower (Magnolia virginiana)
This species of magnolias wouldn’t be easily confused with the much more popular ornamental varieties that are ubiquitous to well manicured southern lawns. Like their popular cousins, these scrawny trees don’t belong in the mountains. They prefer coastal, swampy habitats with wet soils. They are outliers in their present location. So where did they come from and how did they get there?
Did humans plant them there for some long forgotten reason? Did birds or animals somehow drag them in? Just as with any good mystery, a team of detectives is on the case.
Jennifer Allsbrook, a high school biology teacher, founded the Magnolia Detective project to help her solve this mystery, while opening her students to the joys of biotechnology research.
The project has already garnered two grants from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, providing a total of $16,000 to help her make biotech locally relevant to her students. She has also landed grants from ING and Toshiba foundations to help equip her lab and propel the research.
Allsbrook, who holds a B.S. from Appalachian State University and a Master of Life Science degree from the University of Maryland, said her tree-tracking exploits started a couple of years ago when she was looking for a way to incorporate more biotechnology into her teaching.
To help solve this mystery, Allsbrook recruited Andrea Wolfe, Ph.D., a scientist at the Ohio State University to teach her how to genetically analyze the magnolias as a means of tracing the trees’ lineage.
“She uses a technique called ISSR DNA fingerprinting,” said Allsbrook. “I’d never heard of that before. But it’s amazing. It’s so exacting you can identify individuals within a population.”
Allsbrook has collected leaves and numbered specific trees so that she and the students can continue to compare DNA fingerprints. This, in turn, opened the door to the relatively new specialty called phylogeography – the study of the historical processes that may be responsible for the contemporary geographic distributions of individuals.
The team plans to expand the project to analyze Sweetbay magnolias throughout the North American range. Through continued research and discovery, the Magnolia Detectives might learn where those trees came from – and just maybe how they got there.
American business leaders rue the lack of home-grown skilled workers. This is a problem governors and legislators have been acknowledging for years. However, a recent 
