Description
In today’s highly competitive world, students need more than just high SAT scores and GPAs to help guarantee admission to more competitive schools. One way students can stand out is by engaging in creative science projects that demonstrate ability to perform research and present findings. Not only do science extracurriculars make the college application more impressive, they also help develop valuable skills and knowledge that can be useful in future academic and professional endeavors. Over the course of six sessions, students will engage in an instructor led online bioinformatics and molecular biology project; learn about pathogens that play a role in major diseases affecting our food system; discover molecular biology tools that help with sequencing of genomes of various pathogens; download sequences from scientific databases; perform sequence alignments, and more. The course will consist of 30-min group sessions with 15-20 min of self-paced work online.
Dr. Bhanu Harrison has an extensive background in Plant Pathology with a PhD from Washington State University, studying grapevine diseases. She currently holds a Head of Development position working on citrus (orange, grapefruit, lemon) plant diseases. The pre-requisites for the course are as follows: A basic understanding of molecular biology terms – Nucleic acids such as DNA & RNA, replication, transcription, and translation; Or the completion of one semester of 11th grade Biology or AP Biology.
