Program General Information

In partnership with the Teacher’s Institute at the Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), CPIMA has been working to bring its cutting edge research to high school classrooms and the general public. Supported in part by a grant from the Dreyfus Foundation, the Summer Program Integrating Research Into Teaching Science (SPIRITS) program provides summer internships to high school chemistry teachers to work on projects translating the research being conducted at CPIMA into lessons that can be used in the classroom and exhibits that can be used in the museum. This program capitalizes on the research strengths of CPIMA and on the public science education expertise of the Exploratorium’s Teacher Institute.

The first team of high school chemistry teachers in the program, Gary Benz (American High School, Fremont, CA) and Claudia Winkler (Gunn High School, Palo Alto, CA) chose to work on translating the research conducted in Prof. Vijay Pande’s group on protein folding. They have produced materials for both the high school classroom and the museum floor.