Outreach

CAMBIA has been an active player at Caltech to bring STEM to elementary, middle and high school students. This was born out of our committment to offer a first class experience to disadvantaged students so they can see in locus how a lab looks like, hear how the scientific investigation is conducted, recognize the diversity of individuals on the bench, and foster a sense of possibility for a bright future full of discoveries. We see our effort as an opportunity to introduce to these young students the value of the scientific endeavor to benefit our communities and the world at large.

We invited and brought to campus students and their chaperones from Los Angeles and Pasadena schools to visit the plant lab of Prof. Elliot Meyerowitz. We engaged graduate students and postdocs to volunteer and present in a simple way their research work. We also visited their schools and lectured there instead of at campus. For part of the day the students were doing interactive segmentation of stem cells on tablets and in the computer lab either at Caltech or at their home school. This was a fun and engaging Citizen Science experience for the students as they actively contributed to an image annotation effort using a web based tool developed at CAMBIA, CoSe. Their combined results were then used to build a full segmentation and later on used as training data to build deep learning cell segmentation models.

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