Discovery Days 2015

On October 16, 2015, the HPI once again took part in the Discovery Days program. This is a great event that brings several hundred high school students to the University of Calgary from all over Alberta, giving them a taste of what scientific research is all about. I, along with Russell and Janneke (and with help from Christina) ran the Parasite Genomes section, educating the students and teachers about some of the wonderfully weird and gruesome details of these creatures. We had two groups of 20 students come through. Each session involved some lecture information, samples of many of the parasites discussed, information on what a genome is and how it can be useful, and finally a bioinformatics activity where they had to diagnose parasite infections from sequence data.

The students seemed to enjoy the HPI section, and everyone was quite engaged in the various activities. There was quite a bit of positive feedback, with Jonathan Wilcox (a science teacher from the Renert School in Royal Oak) asking if we could put on a similar workshop in his school, and remarking “Russell, Janneke, Dave, and Christina did a fabulous job! Really did a great job!”