OKLAHOMA CITY COMMUNITY COLLEGE OUTREACH

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC), along with Redlands College, Comanche Nation College, and Tulsa Community College forms an outreach core in the INBRE project in order to promote student success among freshmen and sophomores in formative science courses at community colleges. Community colleges educate very large percentages of students enrolled in introductory science courses and students from underrepresented groups are more likely to start at a community college. Community college students are linked to biomedical research programs and career paths directly through summer research internships and new science programming (bioinformatics). Indirectly students benefit from the updating of community college science faculty through summer externships, workshops, and conferences as well as from closer ties to the research universities of Oklahoma. The grant provides equipment to support and enhance instructional laboratory experimentation. Community college students accepted for the summer internship attend a special course prior to the internship to prepare them for laboratory work: Introduction to Life Sciences Laboratory Techniques. We call it the Lab Boot Camp and teach basics of lab safety, scientific integrity, calculating and making solutions, making media, aseptic technique, keeping a laboratory notebook, use of balances, centrifuges, micropipettors, pH meters, spectrophotometers, electrophoresis equipment, gel documentation imaging, chromatography, BLAST searches, and more. The Lab Boot Camp could be a model for other programs that bring undergraduates into a biomedical research lab for the summer.