Together with Dr. Jamie Shuda, Steve Farber created a Science Outreach Program, Project BioEYES, that incorporates life science and laboratory education using zebrafish. The outreach program has two main components: educating teachers through hands-on training and tours of our zebrafish facility, and bringing the zebrafish to K-12th grade classrooms for hands-on experiments. The program teaches students about science literacy, genetics, the experimental process, and the cardiovascular system through the use of live zebrafish.

The mission of BioEYES is to foster an enthusiasm for science education, promote interest for future participation in a biology-related field, and allow all students the opportunity to learn life science through a hands-on, student-centered approach to instruction. The goals of the program encompass educating the community about life science and incorporating live research as the primary teaching tool. We provide our services to all students and teachers regardless of community, poverty or race. Project BioEYES is currently serving children in Philadelphia, PA; Baltimore, MD; Salt Lake City, UT; and Melbourne, Australia public and private school districts.

This program has garnered significant excitement among primary school faculty in the region and the scientific press. Since we began, over 100,000 students have participated in our in-class zebrafish unit.

Scientific Area: 
Science Education
Reference to Person: 
Steven Farber
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Inaugural Carnegie DEI mini-grants awarded
January 10, 2022

Washington, DC—In an effort to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion work throughout the organization and our surrounding communities, Carnegie has awarded 10 projects with inaugural DEI mini-grants.

“The mini-grant program launched last fall and was designed to enable Carnegie faculty, postdocs, and staff to obtain funding for small-scale projects that help advance our local and institutional DEI goals,” said Associate Science Deputy Anat Shahar, who with Science Deputy and Observatories Director John Mulchaey oversees Carnegie’s DEI efforts.

The mini-grant program provides up to $5,000 to support DEI-related projects, ideas, or

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Carnegie Academy for Science Education Receives Amgen Biotech Experience Funding—Impacts Virtual STEM Learning in Washington, D.C.
September 23, 2020

In 2017 the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE) was selected to manage the Amgen Biotech Experience (ABE) site in Washington, D.C., called ABE-DC. The Amgen Foundation has now awarded CASE an additional three years of funding. ABE-DC established an extensive professional development program and a rigorous biotechnology curriculum, including research-grade laboratory equipment loaned to D.C. high school teachers to implement real-world biotechnology labs in their classrooms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CASE’s ABE-DC programming has pivoted to a virtual curriculum.

This fall corresponds to the start of the second grant cycle of CASE’s Amgen Foundation

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DC STEM Network to Share $1-Million Award in STEM Coalition Challenge
May 21, 2018

Washington, D.C. –The DC STEM Network is one of eight groups to win the US2020’s 2018 STEM Coalition Challenge. The Challenge was a nationwide competition for communities toincrease hands-on STEM mentoring and maker-centered learning to underrepresented students. The winners were announced at the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, last week. The DC STEM Network will receive a share of a $1 million award which will support further innovative, STEM-based learning for Washington, DC students.

The Network was selected from 92 applications from 35 states, representing more than 1,800 nonprofits, companies, school districts, and local government partners. The Network is

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Exciting Trip for DC Grand Prize Winners to International STEM Fair!
April 23, 2018

Washington, DC — On Saturday, March 17, middle and high school students in the nation’s capital showed off their science and math skills in a full-day celebration of STEM education and innovation at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School. More than 100 local students participated in the 2018 DC STEM Fair, where they presented their own science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) projects to a group of 80 volunteer judges, including representatives from local universities, STEM professional organizations, research institutions, and STEM employer groups.

Three DC high school students were selected as grand prize winners of the DC STEM Fair’s Senior

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Advanced Education Programs

Carnegie is renowned for its post-doctoral and graduate student fellowship programs, which operate on each of the Carnegie campuses. Our fellows participate fully in the institution’s vigorous intellectual life, and have complete access to the laboratory instruments and facilities at the institution. The fellowships are extremely competitive, and are prized for their independence and for the resources they afford the fellows. The fellowships vary in duration depending on the research area. Each fellow is key to ehnancing the Carnegie mission and expanding Carnegie's influence of unfettered, imaginative scientific research into the next generations.  For information about

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Math for America DC

Fifty years ago, Americans led the world in math and science, claiming some of the most important inventions and technological breakthroughs of the 20th century.  Today, American 15-year-olds rank 25th in math compared to their peers worldwide.  Math ƒor America DC strives to reclaim America’s reputation for scientific greatness by recruiting and supporting the very best secondary education math teachers.

Here in Washington DC, the majority of secondary school students are not math proficient.  Only about two thirds of secondary school math teachers are fully certified.Our goals follow:

Recruit candidates with strong math knowledge and teaching
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Carnegie Academy for Science Education
Carnegie Academy for Science Education

Scientific literacy is now recognized to be crucial for our nation's progress in the 21st century.

The Carnegie Institution, a pre-eminent basic research organization, has fostered the development of scientific knowledge since the early 20th century. For many years, this meant the training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the Institution's laboratories, located in Washington, DC and around the country.

In 1989, Maxine Singer, then president of Carnegie, founded First Light, a Saturday science school for children. This was the start of the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE) whose goal is to encourage interest in science among school

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Ana Bonaca

Ana Bonaca is Staff Member at Carnegie Observatories. Her specialty is stellar dynamics and her research aims to uncover the structure and evolution of our galaxy, the Milky Way, especially the dark matter halo that surrounds it. In her research, she uses space- and ground-based telescopes to measure the motions of stars, and constructs numerical experiments to discover how dark matter affected them.

She arrived in September 2021 from Harvard University where she held a prestigious Institute for Theory and Computation Fellowship. 

Bonaca studies how the uneven pull of our galaxy’s gravity affects objects called globular clusters—spheres made up of a million

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Peter Gao

Peter Gao's research interests include planetary atmospheres; exoplanet characterization; planet formation and evolution; atmosphere-surface-interior interactions; astrobiology; habitability; biosignatures; numerical modeling.

His arrival in September 2021 continued Carnegie's longstanding tradition excellence in exoplanet discovery and research, which is crucial as the field prepares for an onslaught of new data about exoplanetary atmospheres when the next generation of telescopes come online.

Gao has been a part of several exploratory teams that investigated sulfuric acid clouds on Venus, methane on Mars, and the atmospheric hazes of Pluto. He also

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Anne Pommier

Anne Pommier's research is dedicated to understanding how terrestrial planets work, especially the role of silicate and metallic melts in planetary interiors, from the scale of volcanic magma reservoirs to core-scale and planetary-scale processes.

She joined Carnegie in July 2021 from U.C. San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she investigated the evolution and structure of planetary interiors, including our own Earth and its Moon, as well as Mars, Mercury, and the moon Ganymede.

Pommier’s experimental petrology and mineral physics work are an excellent addition to Carnegie’s longstanding leadership in lab-based mimicry of the

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Johanna Teske

Johanna Teske became the first new staff member to join Carnegie’s newly named Earth and Planets Laboratory (EPL) in Washington, D.C., on September 1, 2020. She has been a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA, since 2018. From 2014 to 2017 she was the Carnegie Origins Postdoctoral Fellow—a joint position between Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (now part of EPL) and the Carnegie Observatories.

Teske is interested in the diversity in exoplanet compositions and the origins of that diversity. She uses observations to estimate exoplanet interior and atmospheric compositions, and the chemical environments of their formation

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