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This project is a collaboration among nine institutions (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), Rockefeller University, SUNY-Stony Brook, UC-San Francisco, Scripps Research Institute, Rutgers, Washington University and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), based at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. We will establish in each institution a program piloted at MSOE and UW-Madison for introducing protein structure and function to high school students (grades 9-12). The project has two elements: (i) addition of protein modeling to the existing national Science Olympiad (SO) competition for high school students, and the design and production of 3-dimensional physical models of proteins by high school SMART teams (Students Modeling A Research Topic) in collaboration with faculty of these research universities, with mentoring by undergraduates, graduate students, and post-docs (future faculty).
Younger students (grades 9-10) are introduced in the SO program to the concept of 3-D protein structure using materials ("mini-toobers"-- bendable, foam-covered wires as protein backbones) and methods developed and tested by the MSOE Center for BioMolecular Modeling. In the "pre-build" phase of the SO Protein Modeling competition, students construct a toober model of a protein featured as a Molecule-of-the-Month (a regular feature on the PDB web site). In the "on-site" competition, students are challenged to model a second protein using RasMol to examine its structure, and to answer questions about the protein and the research group that determined its structure. By adding protein modeling to the SO events, we will expose about five thousand high school students each year to this subject.
More advanced students (grades 10-12), working as SMART teams with a teacher and a future faculty member as mentor, will be matched with a local research lab. They will visit this lab, get acquainted with the PI and future faculty who work there, and then work with the lab to design and produce a 3-D physical model of the protein that is being investigated. The team also produces a poster that is presented in poster sessions at regional and national meetings.
High school teachers will be prepared to work with SMART teams in week-long workshops conducted at the MSOE Center for BioMolecular Modeling in Milwaukee. Future faculty from each participating university will be trained for their mentoring roles in a summer workshop patterned after the Entering Mentoring program designed by HHMI Professor Jo Handelsman and now a part of the UW-Madison curriculum. Out of this summer workshop at the UW-Madison, a "Mentor Manual" will be assembled with materials that will help to set up similar programs elsewhere. It will include sections on protein structure, modeling with software and 3-D printers, and mentoring high school students. It will be useful to high school teachers and to future faculty and faculty mentors. The other seven universities will develop analogs of this set of programs, adapted to their local needs and resources and informed by the results at the UW-Madison.
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