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Cultivating Young Scientific Minds Through Life Science Outreach

Engaging our communities through unique opportunities in science education

Students finishing high school face a daunting decision: choosing a post secondary direction and, hopefully, charting a successful and rewarding career path. Complicating the decision – especially for science students – is an lack of information and real-world exposure to career possibilities.

As a result, students may be missing out on the chance to tap into their true calling, and Canada could be leaving its budding scientific minds undeveloped.

To give high school students a hands-on feel for a professional and active science environment, UBC’s Life Sciences Institute (LSI) launched an innovative outreach program in 2009. UBC saw an opportunity to invite students to participate in a fun and interesting one-day, real-world lab in the hopes of sparking their interest in science as a career.

The program – dubbed ‘CSI at the LSI’ by the UBC graduate students who spearheaded the event – is a modern day murder mystery. Students are provided with a list of suspects, complete with mug shots, motives, and evidence samples of blood, saliva, hair and skin. They use real scientific procedures and the latest research equipment to narrow down the list of suspects and finger the murderer.

In the three years since the program was started, more than one hundred students have been introduced to the possibility of a career in science through this unique outreach program. Thanks to recent funding from the Government of British Columbia, the LSI was able to host a grade ten class from Bella Bella Community School on British Columbia’s central coast, allowing students from outside the lower mainland to experience a working lab environment for the first time. But additional funding is needed to ensure that the LSI can continue its outreach.