Murdock Partners in Science: host a high school teacher in your lab

The M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust offers summer stipends for high school science teachers to work in OHSU labs. The Partners in Science program supports science teachers in labs for 8 weeks during 2 consecutive summers. Teachers receive stipends of $5000 per summer. And PIs receive research help from dedicated, enthusiastic, and mature thinkers.

The goal of the program is to immerse high school science teachers in a research environment so that they can better translate and model how science is conducted to their students. It has been a very successful program, and OHSU has been involved from the beginning in 1985.

If you are interested, there is a two-part application process:

First, if you would like to be a mentor and host a teacher in your lab, please submit a short description of a project a high school teacher could take part in over two summers. This description should include 3-4 sentences of the work you do in your lab and an additional 2-3 sentences of the specific project the teacher would participate in.  (See examples here.) Make sure your descriptions are lay friendly as they will be sent to high school principals and science department chairs throughout the Portland Metropolitan area and beyond to match teachers to labs. It is not necessary for you to identify a teacher; the Murdock Trust will collect names of teachers seeking these research opportunities and will provide those to OHSU.  Send your project description to Susan Shugerman by October 12.

Second, if your are matched with an interested teacher, you must complete a  3-page application and the teacher matched to your lab will complete a 2-page candidate statement. These will be submitted to the Murdock Charitable Trust for consideration. The deadline for completed applications is December 1, 2009.  Please note that the normal business process of submitting your grant to Research Grants and Contracts still applies.

If you have not mentored a teacher in the past, you may want to speak with colleagues who have participated in the program over the years – a list of these colleagues can be obtained by emailing Susan. The teachers are screened and undergo a rigorous application process before they are placed with a lab.

If you are interested in learning more about this program, please contact Susan Shugerman. You can also check out more details about the program please visit the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust website.