VISITING SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA STAN-X PARTNER SCHOOLS

Harvard Westlake

Seung & Melody selfie

Seung visited the Harvard Westlake School, hosted by Ms. Melody Lee, instructor and head of the science department. H-W is in the first year of their Stan-X curriculum and there was energy and excitement during Seung's visit. He instructed students in reading original science papers, including the Park et al, 2014 study in PLoS Genetics.

He then separately met with school leadership to discuss the trajectory of implementation and planned classroom renovations for the course.  Later, he and Ms. Lee discussed next steps including collaborations with Cory Evans and students across town at Loyola.

Loyola Marymount University

     Seung next visited Dr. Cory Evans at Loyola Marymount on March 24th, and presented a lecture to current and prospective students in the Stan-X course there: "Stan-X: a global network for experiential science instruction". Dr. Evans has been on the faculty at Loyola Marymount for several years, and is one of our partners who runs a course at a university. Cory is highly skilled in the pedagogy related to Drosophila lab-based courses: for many years he helped to run the famous fruit fly genetics course for undergraduates at UCLA, founded by (among others) Dr. Utpal Banerjee.  In addition, Dr. Evans has his own fly lab at LMU. After Seung's lecture, he had a tour of the magnificent campus (it was a windy, sunny day in the greater-LA area) then met with school leadership to discuss mechanisms to enhance this growing collaboration around practice-based science instruction. He hopes to return soon.