Socrates Fellows Program teams high school teachers with UCSD grad students

While Socrates graduate students and teachers look on at Scripps Pier, Socrates Fellow Ignacio Vilchis explains how his doctorate research in ocean climate study is shedding light on bird and... Click here for more information.

Building upon the success of its BioBridge science education outreach program, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) has this summer launched an enhanced initiative to further bring the excitement of scientific research directly into area high school classrooms. The new program has an interesting twist: participating UCSD doctoral students in research benefit as much as high school teachers and students.

Called the Socrates Fellows program, the project—recently funded through a five-year $3 million GK-12 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—pairs high school science teachers with UCSD doctoral students who are currently working in active research laboratories at the university under the guidance of faculty researchers.

In the program, each teacher-doctoral student team (nine teams funded per year) will work together over the summer to develop innovative ways to integrate the doctoral student's research focus (including its science concepts and themes) into the teacher's science classroom curriculum starting in the fall.

This summer's participating teachers are from Sweetwater Union High School District, San Diego Unified School District, Grossmont Union High School District, and Helix Charter School. The graduate students represent various areas of biological research, including Biological Sciences, Biomedical Sciences, Marine Biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), and Biological Oceanography at SIO.

To greatly facilitate an exciting team learning experience, research focus areas this summer are both leading-edge and different, ranging from studying the communication and navigation systems of social bees to investigating the physiology of the human gastrointestinal tract, and how various organisms survive under extremely high pressure in the deep sea.