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By Alan M. Hoberman
The ACT Resource Committee was tasked with spending some of the College’s reserve funds to further our mission to Educate, Lead and Serve. Over the past few years, ACT has significantly increased its funding of North American and international graduate and post-doctoral students to attend our annual meeting and provide some funding for their research. These additional activities are being incorporated into our standard practices for our Annual meeting and will come under the auspices of the Awards Committee.
It is time to look for additional ways to support our mission. The article below, is from a group (PSBR) for which I have been on the board for the past 12 years. The mission of PSBR is to educate K-12 on the use of animals in research. PSBR has focused on several programs including BIOEYES (described below) for the past several years. As a Board member of PSBR and a member of ACT, I thought that it would be within the mission of ACT to support programs like BIOEYES and for example the Great Grow Along (uses rats to demonstrate the effects of various diets growth and development) to be promoted nationwide. Rather than ACT taking on these programs directly, it was my thought that we could support PSBR with some seed money to allow programs like BIOEYES to be packaged for in classrooms across the country.
I would be interested to see if our members consider this an appropriate use of our funds to support K-12 education projects like BIOEYES or other programs that you are aware of in your state. My concept is that these would be one-time grants with some dollar limit. I would see the need to develop a grant proposal process that the Resource Committee could review. This type of funding would be new for ACT, so read about BIOEYES and let me hear your thoughts at Alan.hoberman@crl.com  
BioEYES has served over 48,000 Philadelphia students and is an official partner of the School District of Philadelphia. This program addresses critical shortfalls in educating future STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) professionals from under-served, under-resourced populations. Moreover, most teachers are not equipped to integrate novel, hands-on experiments into their hour-long science classes. Our partnership with Philadelphia schools enables 40 teachers and 3,000 students per year to participate, of whom 100% receive free or reduced lunches, an indicator of poverty, and 50% are African American.
Founded in 2002 by Dr. Jamie Shuda, a Philadelphia educator, and Dr. Steven Farber, a developmental biologist, BioEYES teaches under-served K-12 students how to think and act like a scientist. The key to BioEYES’ approach is that students and teachers become scientists during the course of a weeklong experiment — raising zebrafish embryos from a single cell to a free-swimming larva with a visible heartbeat. Students set up fish crosses to obtain embryos, observe embryo and larvae development under microscopes, and utilize the scientific method to identify the phenotype of the offspring (middle school) or the genotypes of the parents (high school). BioEYES levels the playing field so that students of all abilities are able to gain the confidence to pursue science. Each day, just like a research scientist in the laboratory, they hypothesize and test ideas, record findings, and think critically about the impact scientific research has on our community.
BioEYES carefully measures the learning gains of participating students. All students receive a pre and post-test to examine their content knowledge about genetics, the experimental process, and grade appropriate biology concepts. Findings from a student meta-analysis from 2010-2014 indicate that all grade levels have significantly more content knowledge following the BioEYES experience, therefore increasing their knowledge of complex content such as genetics, developmental and cell biology, and model organisms. A full report can be made available.
BioEYES cannot keep up with demand in Philadelphia and there is presently a one-year waitlist for teachers who express interest. In 2016, the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research (PSBR) formed a partnership with BioEYES to offer this program outside of the Philadelphia city limits. During the first year of the pilot collaboration, PSBR served approximately 250 students. In 2017, the number of engaged students increased to approximately 650. This year, PSBR is partnering with BioEYES to serve over 1200 students at 10 different schools.
The primary goal of Project BioEYES is to engage all children in real-world science, creating a cycle of informed and experienced science citizenry and workforce. We are proud of the impact we are making and continue to strive to create an abundance of opportunities for students, teachers, and the community to ignite and grow their passion for science. Thank you for your willingness to learn about Project BioEYES. Please visit the newsroom at www.bioeyes.org to get a glimpse of our students in action. For more information about PSBR, please visit www.psbr.org.
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