Posted by: Alexis Norris, PhD, Member of ASHG Information & Education Committee
I’m pleased to share that the ASHG Information & Education (I&E) Committee has revamped the previous Genetic Education Outreach Network (GEON) program as the Genetics Engagement & Education Network. The purpose of this program is to create a network for ASHG members to engage and educate. Members of the network will receive a quarterly newsletter, have access to a toolkit of educational resources vetted by the I&E Committee, and have their name added to the Network directory. The directory can be used by ASHG members to find speakers and collaborators, and by the public to connect with members about human genetics-related questions. Questions often range from visiting a classroom, to hosting a field trip, to offering academic and schooling advice.
In our world of wide-reaching, fast paced, and bite-sized communication, we are faced with communicating our science to many audiences, from fellow scientists in our field to the lay public. It is challenging to share information in a way that it is both approachable and understandable. Engaging in education outreach can improve your science communication, through the experience of deconstructing complex concepts into their digestible parts, and identifying what sparks the audience’s interest.
The toolkit and newsletter will also give members access to new ideas about how to communicate and educate. ASHG members can enroll in the Network through the ASHG portal indicating their geographical region and outreach audiences of interest (e.g., high school, college, or general public).
For teachers, inviting an ASHG member to their classroom has immediate and clear benefits for their students. First, the activity can be timed to coincide with genetics lessons, thus reinforcing concepts and their applications. The ASHG member also provides a tangible example of a career path in genetics, and a potential resource and networking connection for the students.
Why I Find Genetics Outreach Rewarding and Impactful
I got involved with genetics outreach during my graduate training. Over the last eight years of outreach in high schools across the state of Maryland, I have found that I have the biggest impact on students in rural regions that are far from research institutions, where the students have limited exposure and access to genetics research. At the ASHG Annual Meeting in San Diego last fall, I spent two days before the meeting in Ms. Heather Gastill’s biology classes at the local Mission Bay High School. I had the students identify fish by DNA sequences on paper slips, using real sequencing data from Thomsen et al. For thirty minutes, the students helped each other decode the 100 sequences, creating a barplot of the frequency of different fish species on the classroom whiteboard.
My favorite moment was when each class: (1) calculated the time it would have taken them to go identify the full dataset (millions of sequences), (2) laughed at the absurdity of how long it would take them, and then (3) was mesmerized by my slide that showed how I did it in a couple of hours on my laptop with just a few sentences of bioinformatics code. After each class, a few students would ask me how they can become a bioinformatician. That is why I love genetics outreach.
Ready to join the Genetics Engagement & Education Network? Learn more on the ASHG website.
Alexis Norris, PhD, joined the ASHG Information & Education (I&E) Committee during her postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is currently a Bioinformatician at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).