BioBuilder is not just about exposing students (to biotech), but making them excited enough to pursue it as a career.”
Rebekah Ravgiala is an award-winning biotechnology teacher at Tyngsborough High School in Massachusetts. She attended the first BioBuilder teacher professional workshop at MIT in 2011 and was hooked. Her excitement about synthetic biology motivated her to lead her school’s iGEM/BioBuilderClub teams year after year. In 2012, Rebekah registered and trained as an advanced BioBuilder instructor, learning how to teach other teachers the BioBuilder curriculum. Since then she has co-taught summer workshops for teachers in Cambridge, Mexico, and online. She serves on the BioBuilder Board of Directors, leading the pivot to online programs during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic shutdown and supporting new BioBuilder teachers after their professional development experiences.
In this podcast, Rebekah shares her BioBuilder experiences and how “biotech with a purpose” helped her get unstuck as a teacher, bringing ambitious new educational goals in reach. She also describes how the BioBuilderClub supported her students through the challenging year of online learning.
Read the show notes