Step 1: Assemble a diverse and motivated team

For successful events, a team of committed organizers is essential. These groups can form from within a research group or a larger research community. We started with a team of organizers from 1 research group and recruited researchers from the larger UCLA community, especially from the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (QCBio), by advertising at QCBio community and graduate program events. Our committee consisted of a core group of 4 to 6 organizers who met weekly throughout the year with app. 10 additional members joining in the weeks leading up to and on the event days. There were roughly equal numbers of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and a few undergraduate researchers in both the core group and the larger team. This provided a useful balance of perspectives and experiences. Members participated in anywhere from one to all events, based on availability, expertise, and skill sets. Members chose tasks of interest to them, and roles were not restricted by career stage in any way. Leadership of meeting facilitation rotated. With this flexible setup, we were able to divide the preparatory workload, such that we could develop well-planned activities without overwhelming organizers. The many educators (7 to 8 for the science workshops, 14 for the career panel) also enabled small facilitator-to-student ratios (1:4 to 1:2) for all breakout groups during the sessions, which was especially critical for student engagement in the virtual environment. Although significant interest, passion, and time commitment from the organizers was essential, especially when developing an independent outreach program from scratch, our committee structure allowed for flexibility in the members’ commitments over time, which we found to be important for maintaining enthusiasm in the voluntary outreach work. We anticipate that this distribution of responsibilities and broad recruitment effort will aid the longevity of QBio-EDGE. Yearly changes in membership are anticipated in a university setting, so regular recruitment of new members is important. Three out of app. 17 ECRs involved at some point in the first year of programming participated regularly in the second year, and we recruited 5 new organizers. In addition, app. 8 other ECRs (either with first year experience or newly recruited) contributed to individual events.

Additionally, it is important to assemble a team that is diverse in academic experiences and personal identities. Lack of inclusion and isolation is often a key factor in students and researchers dropping out of college and academic career paths [31–33]. As researchers of different genders, races (e.g., black, white, Asian), ethnicities (e.g., Hispanic), and nationalities (e.g., US, Germany, France, China, India) as well as educational backgrounds, scientific fields, and career stages, QBio-EDGE facilitators could physically demonstrate to students the diversity of people who work in academia to offset some of these sentiments. Providing visibility through personal identity-matched role models can improve academic interest, performance, and retention [24]. Practically, it also allowed us to cater more specifically to student interests. For example, during the career panel session, we facilitated breakout groups for different areas of science (e.g., biology, engineering/physics, math/computer-science, health sciences), each staffed with multiple researchers at different career stages (ranging from undergraduate student to assistant professor) with varying personal identities.

Step 2: Connect with local schools to form an equitable and trusting partnership

Outreach should always address the expressed needs and goals of the community it aims to serve. Identifying a school that is suitable for and open to the outreach activity can often be a first hurdle, especially when researchers are new to the community. To make a meaningful contribution, we partner with schools that serve students who have either historically been excluded from college campuses and/or that have little STEM-focused resources. As a new, ECR-run organization without established contacts, we leveraged a connection to Synergy Quantum Academy, which was founded in 2011 to close the achievement gap in South Central Los Angeles. It mainly serves students of color from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and strives to improve STEM access, sharing the goals of our initiative. One of our team members is an alumna of the school and described how despite the school’s STEM focus, she would have benefited from more training in research skills to facilitate participation in academic research during college and from exposure to role models working in STEM-focused careers.

This alumna initiated the first contact with the school during the summer (Table 1) and helped form a trusting partnership. In absence of such personal contacts, we recommend researching local schools (local undergraduate students can be particularly helpful) and reaching out to their leadership teams (e.g., principals or program directors) directly. Researchers in California, for example, can use the California school dashboard [30] to identify nearby schools that serve predominantly socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Another option is to network with outreach and college recruitment programs on campus to build on existing relationships.

We found it important to communicate with school teachers prior to any activities to educate ourselves about the students’ needs, so they can directly inform planning [34]. We met with Dr. Shannon before the start of the school year (Table 1) to learn more about how we could best serve her students. She expressed the importance of high schools and universities having an ongoing dialogue regarding required skill sets to provide the students with the best preparation possible, especially for STEM courses at the college level. We followed her suggestion to integrate our workshops in her “Principles of Biomedical Science” course due to the best match in topic. This increased the chances of our workshops being meaningful to the attending students, since they enrolled in the course based on interest. At Synergy Quantum Academy, 70% of students on the Biomedical Science track have taken courses involving some computational skills, but after discussions with Dr. Shannon, it was clear that there remained a particular need to increase exposure of students to examples of the application of computational skills to real-world problems outside of computer science classes. We coordinated the topics, timings, and length of our outreach sessions to best integrate them into the existing course curriculum and class times. By coordinating our sessions with the teacher, we facilitated students’ learning by connecting our sessions with their prior knowledge [35].

Maintaining open and regular communication throughout the year in a process of co-creation with both teacher and students, applying principle of empathetic teaching and student-centered learning [28], allowed us to improve the utility of our sessions. For example, when we provided the students time to ask questions during the career panel, we observed a desire to know more about attending college and majoring in science compared to information about later career stages. Following these observations, we redesigned the career panel for the following year to include more information about undergraduate science education and recruited more current undergraduate students to share their experiences and expertise. Additionally, after feedback from the teacher, we learned to leave more time for the students to respond to questions posed to the class in future sessions.

One goal was to establish a more authentic, long-term relationship with the school and the students. We accomplished this by spreading the outreach sessions over the school year (October, February, and March) with the same set of students (19 of the 24 students of “Principles of Biomedical Science” course participated in the set of activities), participating in a college essay writing event held by the school in the following October, and adding a mentoring program in the following school year (for a new cohort of students).

Another aspect that facilitated respectful interactions with students was preparatory training. Our facilitators completed a six-module online course on implicit bias management, which is recommended and provided by the University of California [36], and participated in an inclusive classroom training focused on affirming students’ identities [37]. Additionally, the team member who had attended this high school shared her experiences with us and provided background information on the history of systemic racism and its effect on communities in Los Angeles. These activities were intended to improve awareness of these issues in our facilitators, many of whom were unaware of the local and US-specific circumstances due to their international background, and to provide them with strategies for thoughtful and intentional interactions with the students. Through this kind of intentionality, the development and execution of outreach efforts can remain a collaborative process with the communities they serve.

Step 3: Design engaging, learner-centered classroom activities to promote scientific literacy

A shared goal between us and the course instructor was incorporating quantitative biology and its application to real-life problems into the course curriculum. Therefore, we suggested 2 topics: assaying an infection (virology) and predicting the course of a pandemic (computational modeling). After coordinating the topics with the class teacher, we set out to design classroom activities with original teaching materials.

As researchers with limited teaching experience, a key challenge in our first year was to create classroom activities with the following requirements: (1) be engaging and enjoyable for the students; (2) provide an interactive research-like experience [27]; (3) communicate scientific principles; and (4) be deliverable virtually through the Zoom video-conferencing application. To meet these requirements, we designed our materials to use methods found to be useful in pedagogy literature.

To promote critical thinking and feelings of empowerment while engaging students, we took a student-centered approach with problem-based learning [27,28,38,39]. This approach was applied to the virology and computational modeling sessions, where the students took on the role of decision makers solving specific problems: doctors diagnosing a viral infection and public health officials making policy recommendations in a pandemic. For the viral infection case study, we prepared handouts explaining the detection assays, which the students worked through in groups, with a facilitator to guide their inquiry [35]. We prepared mock results, which the students interpreted and combined with hints from the patient’s history to determine the infectious agent. In the epidemiology session, each group used a variation of an SIR model to investigate the effect of a different public health intervention on viral spread. The models were coded in advance by the team on Google Colaboratory [40], a free, web-based interactive Python notebook. Prior to the session, we asked the students about their background in calculus and coding and found that most students had limited experience with both, while some had taken calculus or computer science courses. We designed the session to appeal to students at different levels: the students were asked to alter or add parameters to their model and discuss the effects this had on simulations of viral spread. This platform allowed beginners to identify the correct places to change parameters and interpret their effects, while advanced students read the full code to learn about the full structure of the model and how it was implemented into code. This inclusive, active learning approach was well received by students (Fig 3). Additionally, the emphasis on collaboration promoted an interactive experience resembling scientific research.

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Fig 3. Selection of responses from student feedback survey.

Students were asked to rate how much they agreed with the listed statements as a part of a feedback survey following the Virology (top) and Epidemiological Modeling (bottom) sessions, and 11 out of 19 students responded to each survey.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011072.g003

Based on feedback we received from students using Google Forms, many students (1) would recommend these outreach activities; (2) increased their understanding of the topics discussed; and (3) were able to improve their scientific communication skills (Fig 3). However, the response rate was not very high (app. 58%). For a higher survey response rate, we recommend presenting a link to anonymous pre- and post-session surveys to the class and giving students set time during the session to fill out the survey. Since the de-identified surveys were collected for feedback and assessing the effectiveness of the teaching modules, an IRB approval was not obtained. In addition to the surveys, feedback from Dr. Shannon indicated the students’ appreciation for the real-world science application aspects of the workshops, such as public health policy in a pandemic, which led to enthusiasm for attending the workshops. Through her feedback, we learned the utility of obtaining live feedback from students, such as check-ins on pace and comprehension, a teaching skill we can employ in other settings.

The remote nature of the outreach in its first year reduced the financial resources, time investment, and paperwork required on our side, making it easier to recruit sufficient facilitators and allowing us to focus on the content of the sessions rather than the logistics. It challenged us to make extra efforts to hold the students’ attention, which we attempted to address through problem-based learning and a high facilitator-to-student ratio during the group work (e.g., 1 facilitator and 3 to 4 students). Access to electronic devices and internet connection for participation in the sessions is another challenge for remote programs that the school had already addressed since teaching was entirely remote during that time. Overall, in our subjective experience, a virtual outreach program can work well and may be a useful start, but in-person sessions nonetheless appear better suited to convey scientific excitement and, at least in a local outreach program, provide more equitable access to the program.

Step 4: Cultivate a supportive environment at home institution to sustain outreach program

A supportive environment and sufficient resources are crucial for designing an effective outreach program and for its continued growth. Thus, we recommend a multitiered approach in which individuals from all academic ranks participate. We urge principal investigators (PIs) and others in leadership positions, such as institute and program directors, to leverage resources that may be more limited to an ECR-only group: funding, access to professional and social connections, and laboratory space for activity use.

While the responsibility of securing funds and resources is not required of PIs, we recommend this collaborative approach to leverage the institutional connections PIs have with intramural and extramural funding programs. Additionally, this collaborative approach has the potential to promote institutional support of science outreach programs with local community partners and fosters University–community relationships. We also recommend that PIs promote the program by encouraging involvement of ECRs and faculty. While senior academics could also contribute a more active leadership role, for our group, an ECR-initiated and -run format allowed us to develop our ideas independently and creatively without pressure and avoided performative participation. For researchers, we recommend finding peers passionate about community involvement. Forming the initial critical mass will ease distribution of responsibilities and new peer connections ensure the sustainability of the program. If there is lack of support from PIs or other leadership, we recommend ECRs engage with their University’s Office of Outreach and Engagement or an equivalent program, as well as other community organizations for access to funding and other resources.

We were fortunate that faculty support of our efforts was provided for the program from the start by faculty members giving advice when needed and providing a platform to present our efforts to the UCLA QCBio Institute, which was helpful in recruiting new members. This support motivated QBio-EDGE members and allowed them to devote time needed for a successful program. Institutional support was also demonstrated when the efforts of QBio-EDGE were acknowledged with the “Initiating and Leading Efforts in Diversity and Equity Award” from QCBio.

Unsolicited commitment from faculty at our institute to help identify funding sources has been motivating and provides flexibility for planning in-person activities. Since the inaugural year was primarily virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, not many financial or spatial resources were required. Due to this, no initial solicitations were made to intramural and extramural grant funding programs nor lab spaces sought out for learning modules. Since the inaugural year, university lab space has been used during campus tours for the students in the program, while the learning modules have occurred in the high school classrooms. Financial support for busing students has been provided by the high school. Funds provided by UCLA QCBio were used to purchase food for the students during the campus tours. In the future, financial support will be requested to reimburse ECRs travel to and from the high schools. If institutes and research group leadership truly want to support outreach activities, financial and administrative support is a simple way of showing the seriousness of the institution’s commitment to the cause.

Access to our materials

Detailed information on our program and all our classroom materials can be found at: https://qcb.ucla.edu/qbio-edge.