Science Education
At the Lab, we strongly believe science is for all. We believe responsible science should be without constraints to access and we feel an obligation to take it to the classroom and the masses. This firm belief fuels all our education and outreach efforts. The Lab remains very interested in developing and testing novel content for science education in schools (primarily in high and middle schools), novel kits and ‘toys’ for biology teaching in primary schools and at home as well as taking biology to the masses for improved bio-literacy.
Over the years, according to one estimate, we have engaged more than 20,000+ school children through a wide range of activities at all levels. Some of our flagship projects include:
The Summer Internship Programme is our highly sought after 6-weeks summer internship for students of grades 9-12. This residential programme carries a broad and deep engagement with the latest in biology tailored for these students followed by an independent and original piece of research under an expert mentor that are assigned to each student. The summer ends with the Graduation Day when all students, their friends, teachers and families and members of the community come to celebrate their projects. The programme has been a regular feature in our annual calendar since 2020 with our alumni reaching far and wide at some of the world’s most premier institutions.
The NeoBio Winter Camps are 2-3 day workshops packed with exciting lectures, lab activities and competitions for high school students during their winter breaks.
Synthetic Biology Outreach as part of the SynBioKP project and our IGEM teams, which helped us take exciting new toolkits for disseminating the principles and applications of synthetic biology. This involved the SynBio Design Challenges in high schools, the SynBio cards game.
The Biology Teachers Meetings and Workshops brings together high school biology teachers for engaging the latest ideas and concepts in Biology and for hands on training in molecular biology and biotechnology methods in the Lab.
Our Lab regularly features at public science fairs and festivals across the country, from the Magnifi-Science Fairs in Karachi to the Lahore Science Melas in Lahore. Our Lab also tries to be at school-based Fairs whenever possible.
Visits and classroom tours at the Lab are regular features when science teachers bring their whole classroom on a scheduled visit to the Lab meeting and interacting with scientists of various backgrounds and seeing real-world science in action. These are highly curated occasions that are scheduled and planned upfront.
On the Science education and Education research front our PI has been a founding faculty for biology at the most sought after National STEM School, organised by the Pakistan Innovation Foundation that has been running every year since 2018. The School brings together about 40 of the brightest young high schoolers for a 10-day residential bootcamp. The STEMx online lecture series is also a key feature in our PI’s schedule which reaches an even greater number of students across the country online.
Our PI has also been a co-principal investigator and science faculty lead on the Holistic Teaching of Science in the Muslim World project funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The project aimed at helping science teachers in the Muslim World with six training workshops delivered to cohorts of about 50 teachers from middle and high schools. These were physical workshops in Lahore, Karachi and Bandung (Indonesia) as well as online ones which had teachers from a greater number of counties.