New "MdBioLAb" Makes Debut!

Beginning in February, a unique mobile laboratory designed to enhance bioscience curricula will be available to high school students and teachers throughout Maryland. The lab-on-wheels, called MdBioLab, is the nation's largest, and the first to be custom designed to be pulled by a tractor truck. Comparable to an 18-wheeler, the laboratory is designed to help students in all schools, from rural areas to inner cities, gain access to the state-of-the-art bioscience instruction and lab equipment. MdBioLab will accommodate up to 32 students at once, seven more than the first three mobile bioscience laboratories, in Boston, North Carolina, and Connecticut, which are each housed in buses.

A common goal of mobile bioscience laboratories, like MdBioLab, is to address the challenges to schools posed by inadequate access to equipment and efforts to keep current with a rapidly changing science, according to project leader Stacey Franklin, director, Outreach Programs at MdBio, Inc.

The innovative teaching tool was developed by a partnership of MdBio, Inc., a private, not for profit organization; the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI); and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a not-for profit research institute in Rockville, Md.

The partnership has scheduled "launch events" to introduce MdBioLab in Annapolis on February 3, Baltimore on February 7 and Rockville on February 10.

MdBioLab can accommodate up to 32 students at once. Franklin expects MdBioLab and its associated activities to reach as many as 20,000 students and train hundreds of teachers each year. Starting in February, MdBioLab and its teaching team will hit the road to begin visits to high schools. The lead instructor will be Jen Colvin, a researcher and trainer on loan from TIGR, who will be joined by Scott McIntosh, a teacher at Walkersville High School on loan to the program from Frederick County Public Schools. For more information go to, http://www.mdbiolab.org/.

http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/Extension/msgsnn/msgsnn05_2/mdbiolab.html