Penn State Bioengineers Promote Women in Engineering through Outreach Activities

In the past year, Penn State bioengineers have participated in several outreach activities to promote careers in science and engineering to young girls in local areas. We wanted to stimulate their interest in science and engineering, and broaden their knowledge in our field where the diversity is limited. Through both short educational lectures and hands-on activities, the girls in grades 6-8 had great opportunities to learn about biomedical engineering and other sciences.

Girl Scout Workshop - Graduate Women in Science

Last November, bioengineering graduate students Brittany Banik and Soo Park, led a badge activity for the cadets in a local Girl Scout troop as a part of Penn State Graduate Women in Science. The theme of the workshop was "Eating for Beauty." The workshop leaders Brittany and Soo organized four to five activities, where the cadets learned how eating healthy is related to food balance, calorie intake, daily activity, and sleep. The scouts also ran short experiments to figure out the amount of sugar in everyday beverages, such as soda and fruit juice. Further, the girls made their own healthy trail mix and learned about benefits of each ingredient.

After the workshops, the workshop leaders had an opportunity to serve on a panel for a career discussion. Soo introduced the biomedical engineering field to all Girl Scout members who participated in the workshop and was able to fascinate them with short talks on artificial organs and tissue engineering. While the Girl Scout badge activities were limited to topics related to beauty and health, we would like to offer more engineering oriented activities should the opportunity become available in the future. We hope our engineering oriented activities will create an interest in science for young girls.

Two Powerpoint slides from the Girl Scout Workshop "Eating for Beauty."

STEM Career Day for Girls - Expand Your Horizons

This past February, the Majd research group in the Department of Biomedical Engineering led a workshop called "Expand Your Horizons (EYH) STEM Career Day for Girls" to inspire girls in middle school to become future bioengineers. Directed by Dr. Sheereen Majd, her graduate students, Soo Park, You Jung Kang, and Joseph Kuo organized the workshop titled "Engineering Tiny Human Organs." Also graduate student, Brittany Banik, participated in the career day as a mentor for the girls during their one-day journey to explore their future career options in science and engineering.

In "Engineering Tiny Human Organs," the Majd group had a great opportunity to introduce biomedical engineering as a whole, and more specifically, lithography oriented tissue engineering. Employing the expertise of the Majd group in micro/nanofabricated polymers, the girls participated in a hands-on activity fabricating tiny-featured agarose hydrogels.

The group prepared several designs of the elastic polymer, Polydimethylsiloxane molds, with negative features, such as simple fluidic channels and flowers. The molds were attached to glass slides and placed in an aluminum foil cup to ease the fabrication process. The hands-on activity for the girls included weighing the agarose powder using the laboratory balance, measuring water solution with the graduated cylinder, adding fun colors to the gel with food dyes, and lastly heating the agarose solution to boil and cure in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, the girls heard a short lecture from Dr. Majd about hydrogels, just like ones they made, and how they can be building blocks for amazing tissue engineering in constructing human organs on a lab chip.

It was our hope through our outreach activity not only to promote our department and the university, but inspire young people into our field of biomedical engineering and the scientific community.

- Soo Park, doctoral student in biomedical engineering

Dr. Majd delivered a short lecture to the middle school girls about biomedical engineering during the EYH workshop "Engineering Tiny Human Organs."

The girls fabricated tiny-featured agarose hydrogel with Dr. Majd (in the middle back) and Joseph Kuo (on the front left).

Middle school girls listen as Dr. Majd explains biomedical engineering.