Outreach & Diversity Work

From leading outreach programs to creating diversity initiatives, I have continuously worked to improve educational opportunities for people of all backgrounds and spark scientific interest in students and the public.

Leading & developing outreach programs

As the Director of the biology outreach program Amgen Biotech Experience-San Diego, I oversee the training and support of teachers as they learn concepts and techniques in molecular cloning. Our team provides trained teachers with curriculum, research grade equipment, reagents, and support as they implement our lab activities in their high school classrooms. The program has reached over 30,000 students during my tenure, the majority of which attend Title 1 schools.

As Science Educator at the nonprofit Biocom California Institute, I develop curriculum, provide content expertise, and lead professional development workshops for the Illumina Genomic Discoveries program. Our team trains teachers in fundamentals of genomics and sequencing, and we provide them with curriculum, iSeq 100 sequencers, research grade equipment, reagents, and support as they implement our sequencing lab activities in their high school classrooms.

Creating diversity initiatives

I helped create a new program at UC San Diego, Focus on the Future: The Compton-UC San Diego Connection. This program brought students from Compton High School to take classes and live at UC San Diego for three weeks over the summer. My co-founders and I created this program as part of a call-to-action to improve campus diversity and climate following a string of racial incidents, and to create a positive connection with students in Compton who were particularly affected by the actions of UC San Diego students. We worked with university administrators and high school teachers in Compton to create Focus on the Future, and we recruited graduate student mentors to work with the program’s high school participants throughout their time at UC San Diego. For this work, my co-founders and I were awarded the 2010 Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action & Diversity Award from UC San Diego.

Community involvement

Everyone benefits when scientists and educators break out of the lab/classroom and into the community. Through my work with the Scripps Community Outreach Program for Education and the Grassroots Diversity Action Working Group at Scripps, I have helped scientists create a community presence to promote educational interest and opportunities.

Communicating science to the public

By serving as a science panelist, creating museum exhibitions, giving lectures, and offering laboratory tours, I aim to share my love for biology through my communication of science. This work supports an informed community by helping to bridge the knowledge gap between scientists and the public.