By any measure, this weekend’s UW Science Expeditions was a rousing outreach success. We beat the snowstorm and the Health Sciences Learning Center atrium hosted 32 “Exploration Stations,” 100 people toured UW Hospital’s Clinical Simulation Program, and Ebling Library showed visitors how to find authoritative health information (and showed countless kids how to put a skeleton puzzle together).
Over 90 volunteers, including School of Medicine & Public Health students and faculty, School of Pharmacy students, McPherson Eye Research Institute researchers, Waisman researchers, UW Hospital & Clinics colleagues, and researchers and post docs from the sciences and basic life sciences showed over 500 members of the community the range of research being done at UW. The representative photos on Ebling’s Facebook page indicate the range of participants.
One participant suggested that the event, “…added value to the clinical and health sciences- seeing all this research and these hands on experiments- helps junior high and high schoolers navigate the incredible range of academic opportunities at UW.” Who knows, maybe we met the next pharmacist at PhD candidate Randy Braun’s School of Pharmacy asthma Station or the next physician at Professor Beth Altschafl’s ECG Station.
In UW’s increasingly scrutinized budgetary climate, this extraordinary 3 day event offered a way to demonstrate the strengths of the health sciences and included the public in the research that they support. Thanks to all who participated and all who came. If you have any questions about the event please contact Micaela, msullivan@library.wisc.edu or Tom Zinnen, UW Science Alliance, zinnen@biotech.wisc.edu
Photo of Ebling Librarian, Stephen Johnson and Library Student, Sam Watson talk about resources with Laurence Loewe, geneticist from the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
