Equity, diversity & inclusion

I am a keen promoter of diversity and equity (not just equality) in the access to science education, and to science itself.

I was an Education-Advancement Special Fellow of Science Corps. Over the 6 months of my fellowship, I developed material to teach evolution, genetics, computer programming, and chemistry, for schools in rural communities in the Philippines and the Indian Himalayas. All that material is open and available for free. You can find some of this material on eduversum.org/cvif and on YouTube.

Here is a video I produced recently to extract (impure) DNA from fruits, using the minimum number of reagents possible.

Please note that the intention was not purity of the DNA but clarity of the concepts by using the least, cheapest, easiest to find, and most familiar materials possible.

I tested these protocols with children in the area.

Letting the students get their hands (literally) dirty doing an extraction of DNA from banana, at a local school in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, India.

I have also been training teachers in the area to do this and other demonstrations.

The protocols have been very successful at teacher-training events.

To help the teachers run these demonstrations after I leave, I have been creating easy-to-follow, one-page documents.

(click the image to open the document as a PDF file)

I have made several other contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion in access to STEM; please visit the websites linked above or contact me for further details.