So, I'm at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
I'm the assistant director at that DNA Learning Center.
And I'm talking about bioinformatics and I hope that we have a lot of biologists in the audience
but just in case we don't, I'll try to explain anything that's a little bit extraneous.
First I want to focus on needs and opportunities.
And this is something where we've always tried to direct our work in terms of who we're designing,
I want to say not for, but with.
Who are we trying to reach and who we're thinking about?
So we really find it critical to reach out to those people who don't have the resources to use all
of the things that we consider part of, you know, the high level science objectives at the lab.
We want to reach everyone who has the capacity
because we believe everybody does have the capacity to work on this stuff.
So that means community colleges.
And one important fact that I thought maybe not a lot of people know,
is that almost half the students that start in STEM fields actually have their start at a community college.
So if your solution isn't reaching them, you're missing out half those people.
The other thing is how many people, by show of hands know what a cure is, in terms of education?
Only that half of the room for some reason, interesting.
So this is course based undergraduate research.
I can't talk about it now because lightning talk, but we know that if you follow this approach,
you really increase retention in STEM, you increase graduation rates, that's very well proven.
And then, the baseline that, you know, all underrepresented students,
no matter how you want to slice it, really aspire to do the same things that other students do.
If they're interested in STEM or we get them interested, they're really the same even if the opportunities aren't.
We have this sort of a paradigm that we've been moving towards, of moving people using this experiment
we call DNA bar-coding, which I'll introduce, meta bar coding, to data science.
So in other words, we're thinking about biology as biologists but
we're thinking about getting people to use skills and data as a tool.
And I really think that's a fantastic thing as an educator because I would never want to sell a student on
"you will be that tenured professor in so many years" in a PhD in a biology program somewhere,
where that's the minority of people in their career paths.
So not an alternative career, but a career.
And if I can give you data science skills at the same time that you're learning bio, that's what I want to do.
All these slides you'll be able to get later, the details.
So one of the tools that we built is this thing called DNA subway,
which we really wanted to take some of the bioinformatics out of bioinformatics by,
instead of presenting you right on your first day with using the command-line and using Linux,
we wanted to have a friendly tool, we're from New York so for us the subway is friendly,
but we took all of these different bioinformatics tools
and really repackage them into a usable workflow or interface.
And we have a ton of teaching resources, so if you are a biologist and you know what I'm talking about,
go and look this stuff up, it's all there and free.
DNA bar-coding is essentially this, that you can take an unknown animal, plant, food, whatever,
sequence a little bit of DNA in an experiment that just takes you two hours
with a minimal set of equipment and get a result.
We've been doing this in the city.
These were our first group of winners when we started this competition.
And we really, you know you've heard of things like Intel or Westinghouse,
which students who have tremendous resources are able to do well,
but all of these things we really target at students who maybe even only
had freshman level bio of seventh grade exit bio course.
These were first winners.
They discovered that when they were going to every medicine shop, CVS, Walgreens, whatever,
and buying ginkgo supplements and testing if there was any ginkgo,
there was no ginkgo in anything that they found.
And in fact that was confirmed later by a New York State Attorney General ordered
cease and desist to all these places because the supplements weren't what they say they were.
But it was a cool story of students who were able to just take what we gave them and run with it.
And the cool thing of bar-coding is that, even though we get faculty to learn just a small set of tools,
you can have hundreds of different questions that students come up with themselves.
So we've done it with thousands of students, I could talk more about that.
We also, for those who are talking about in the microbial ecology meta bar-coding, we have one for that.
Jocelyn is in the audience and she started some of this work.
She's got a poster.
There's Jocelyn, talk to her about that.
She's got a webinar on Friday too, somehow...busy.
So, this is another group I'm involved with called NIBLSE.
It's a network for integrating bioinformatics and life science education.
We did a survey of faculty educators across the country.
The only takeaway from this - oh my laser does work -
is that when you look at schools that are minority-serving institutions, you also tend to
see that they are at the two-year colleges.
You also tend to see that they're not integrating bioinformatics, data science,
all those types of related skills.
They're a totally different group then the other different types of institutional context.
We know that 95% of biology educators think it's great to have coding and bioinformatics in the class
but only 40% actually do it.
We know that if you're a minority faculty member, you face more barriers especially in terms of training,
which everybody faces, but minority faculty members themselves face it more.
And then also, minority serving institutions are less likely to give these skills to their students
because they're not prepared.
That echoed that first slide that showed that you know 2% of people are ready to
teach data science at two-year colleges.
This is my last slide.
It's a whole bunch of projects that I'm working with.
CYVERSE provides the infrastructure.
I'm a CO-PI in this Genomics Education Alliance and part of NIBLSE.
These are other groups, I don't know all the ways they might be relevant
but I want you to know I have something to do with them just in case you have an idea.
Please talk to me.
The slides are up there.
And, oh this is the wrong version.
Because, I'll just put it up there, it doesn't matter.
Okay, the reason is this.
I was approached after lunch or I was approached.
Where's Carrie?
How do I present this thing?
Oh there we go.
If you follow me on Instagram or you follow my Twitter you, know about food.
My food list is up there.
If you go to tiny.cc/edsinfood, restaurant recommendations, it's a Google Doc.
You can edit it.
Thank you.
[laughter and clapping]