We held multiple webinars with different professors in Canada to highlight their research in the fields of phage and cancer research. We held a webinar with Dr. Zadeh whose research program focuses on studying primary and skull base brain tumors. We also held a webinar with Dr. Alexander Hynes whose lab focuses on identifying and characterizing new phages to determine the role of phages in shaping our gut microbiome.
We held an internship program where we worked with a group of high school students, exposing them to both our wet lab and outreach work. We had 4 high school interns who rotated between the wet lab and outreach teams. We gave our interns the opportunity to engage in some of our activities such as reaching out to professors and collaborators, creating documents and graphics. We took the time to explain our project idea, using AAVP vectors to target cancer, cancer basics, and some lab techniques we will be using. Our interns got a holistic experience by working with both the wet lab and the outreach team. They got the opportunity to see the inner workings of a research team, get exposed to the iGEM competition, as well as gain more knowledge on research being done at McMaster University.
With Covid measures still in-place, the Human resources team delivered an educational, interactive, and entertaining webinar to the University's Medical Science youth summer program (SuperNOVA). Topics covered basics of genetics/biology, common mechanisms and approaches used in synthetic biology such as CRISPR-cas9, as well as current and future technologies in this field. These topics were organized and presented in a comprehensible manner while maintaining the integrity of the material. Additionally, the kids were challenged to work together to play a game of Kahoot to test their understanding and effectiveness of the webinar, while providing an opportunity to interact with the material. Our webinar was met with many great compliments from staff and campers which highlighted the effectiveness of our webinar. One staff member stated, “Mentorship, such as the hours you dedicated to our programming, creates tangible, inspiring experiences that foster a lifelong interest in STEM and provides our participants with a role model in a field they may not have been exposed to previously”. This project was a valuable and impactful experience for both the campers as well as our team. We were delighted to have been given this awesome opportunity to be able to reach beyond our community in Hamilton to educate the next generation of Scientists and Engineers!
