Facilitating a 30-minute Job Shadow Experience for High School Women

LBNL's K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Program does a variety of critically important and engaging experiences for people in the Bay Area. One of these experiences is the SAGE Camp (Science Accelerating Girl's Engagement). Part of 936-Technologies current work-responsibilities include Postdoctoral research at LBNL. We answered the call of LBNL's K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Program to give two 30 minute job shadow experiences to young women. The experience occurred in Cheryl A. Kerfeld's B64 research space. There, 936-Technologies showed the students a day-to-day workflow of a researcher in synthetic biology (with a focus on techniques in protein engineering). We discussed how nature relies on compartmentalization to organize molecular reactions and how synthetic biologists reuse this strategy to create never-before seen combinations of proteins and other molecules.