The Orbis

Issue date: 2/17/10 Section: News/Features

Media Credit: SSMV faculty Jonathan Creamer SSMV students Laura Moribe, Catherine Caffey, and Emily Alsentzer are introduced to insect stocks at the Bordenstein lab at Vanderbilt.

A unique educational program at Vanderbilt has allowed the university to give back to the Nashville community by opening up new opportunities for some of the area's brightest public high school students. Through the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt (SSMV), many of the students' projects have qualified them for finalist status at national and state level science competitions.

Every week, a select group of Nashville high school students attends SSMV. These students miss high school classes every Wednesday to participate for free in a unique, four-year, interdisciplinary science learning experience.

Now in its third year, the School accepts up to 25 students from Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools each year. Last year, around 150 students applied, 40 received interviews, and 25 were accepted.

In a 2008 article in Lens, a Vanderbilt Medical Center publication, SSMV director Virginia Shepherd explained that Vanderbilt's Outreach Center seeks to connect university scientists and K-12 education. The school offers various interdisciplinary science courses taught by Vanderbilt faculty or guest speakers via video conferencing. These courses have titles like "What if ice sank instead of floated?" and "Searching for life in the universe."

"It's a different approach to learning science," said Ryan Driscoll, a sophomore at Martin Luther King magnet school who aspires to become a doctor of pathology. "In high school, the learning is textbook-oriented, but this program really opens up science to be interactive."

Students take field trips to the Nashville Zoo and to Saint Louis to learn about botanical research. During the summers, students work in teams on research projects and complete independent internships.

The SSMV sophomore class toured the Bordenstein lab in Medical Research Building III at Vanderbilt in late January. Graduate students and post-doctoral students in Seth Bordenstein's lab gave an educational presentation and set up six different stations to teach the visiting students about model organisms, dissections, cell culture, and cell imaging.

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