Grant’s Aim Is to Train, Retain Area’s Future Scientists

In a collaborative effort linking schools, a local college and Ventura County’s burgeoning biotechnology and health-care industries, a new program at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks is aiming to keep aspiring young scientists in the region.

With a $600,000 grant in hand, Cal Lutheran’s Science Outreach Program will work on giving local students a head start in fields such as genetics and medicine by providing workshops, scholarships and internship opportunities at local companies and hospitals.

“The goal is to enhance the academic preparation and motivation of high potential students in Ventura County for careers in the sciences,” said program coordinator Jonathan Boe, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cal Lutheran.

Although Cal Lutheran’s outreach effort will primarily target students from minority backgrounds and those living in less affluent areas of the county, Boe said anyone with an active interest in science and technology is invited to apply.

“We’re looking certainly at high schools with a large proportion of underrepresented groups, but it’s by no means limited to them,” Boe said.

The program’s first phase, a series of five laboratory workshops exploring such scientific concepts as gene replication, could start as soon as this spring at high schools throughout the county.

In addition, students from high schools or local community colleges who show potential in the outreach program will be recruited for the university’s Irvine Scholars Program. The James Irvine Foundation, a nonprofit agency with a mandate of “serving the people of California,” provided the grant money for the program.

As Irvine scholars, students will receive a stipend and partial scholarship to attend Cal Lutheran.

More importantly, scholarship recipients will be eligible for paid internships at companies including Amgen, Columbia Los Robles Hospital and Biopool International, a local manufacturer of blood testing materials.

Boe said the experience students gain by working at local biotechnology and health-care firms, coupled with their education at the university, should make them prime prospects for jobs or admission to graduate programs or medical schools.

“We certainly hope to place them well after they’re finished with this,” Boe said.

The first step will be training high school teachers to teach the five laboratory workshops in their classrooms. Training sessions will begin Saturday.

R. David Bowlis, a biology instructor at East Los Angeles College and outreach consultant for Cal Lutheran, said the workshops will build on preceding lessons using equipment on loan from the university, which will also bear the cost of supplies.

“Cal Lutheran will own the equipment and loan it out to the teachers and provide them with all the supplies of DNA and enzymes, so many teachers and schools who haven’t been able to afford these labs will be able to do them,” Bowlis said.

Bowlis said each of the lab exercises is designed for classrooms with limited supplies and resources and science teachers who have little time for a crash course in esoteric subjects such as DNA mapping.

“We’ve tried to make the labs so that the teacher who is willing to try is going to be successful,” he said. “In the same way, we hope the students who are willing to try will be successful and become excited about science.”

Students in the program will start with simple activities such as separating Kool-Aid into its component parts, Bowlis said, before working their way up to more challenging lab assignments including separating DNA strands and replicating genetic material.

Program coordinators believe exposure to advanced scientific concepts and procedures will benefit all high school students participating in the university’s outreach effort.

The program could be a twofold boon for Conejo Valley Unified School District students--educating them about the burgeoning biotechnology field and giving them a shot at needed scholarship money, said Chuck Eklund, the school district’s director of secondary education.

Experimenting with biotechnology in high school classrooms could turn students on to future careers, he said.

“Biotechnology is a rapidly growing business,” Eklund said. “All you have to do is drive through Newbury Park to see how rapidly Amgen is expanding.”

Times staff writer Kate Folmar contributed to this story.