University of Chicago hosts first South Side Science Festival for family to connect with STEM, increase diversity and help with science literacy.

Before noon on a recent Saturday, dozens of families were walking through University of Chicago’s science quad, enjoying the institution’s first South Side Science Festival.

A sea of the baby blue T-shirts with the word scientist on the back, walked among those with yellow tees, indicating those helping with the event. Tents housed everything from 3D printouts of CT scans of Jurassic mammal teeth and jaws, to fun with lasers by way of microwaves to immunology workshops. The number of beats per minute involved with using CPR dummies was also on the quad.

But it was the tent that offered liquid nitrogen ice cream with toppings that kept 4 ½-year-old Kaden Longworth engrossed.

“We don’t venture out of Hyde Park all that often, so the fact that it’s right here was so convenient,” Longworth said.

And for 7-year-old Kamari Allen, it was the tent with butterflies she could sit in, that resulted in a squeal of delight.

The all-day, all ages event highlighted the importance of STEM education, careers in science and understanding how science impacts daily life. The festival was created to connect South Side community members with science education resources. More than 60 booths with hands-on demonstrations and experiments were on site, as were panel discussions on climate change, health and society, and a career panel where attendees could interact one on one with faculty, research scientists, engineers and medical professionals. About 200 U. of C. student volunteers, many science majors, were on hand to show off why they think science is so cool.

One booth had fifth year Tong Lan and third year Shannon Lu showcasing extracting strawberry DNA from the succulent fruit with dish soap, salt, water, and rubbing alcohol. After one student pulled out a long strand of viscous fluid red DNA with an “Ewww,” Lan and Lu’s faces light up.

“You’re not the first person to say that,” Lu, a chemistry major, said, laughing while mentioning strawberries have eight copies of each type of chromosome within.

“Our lab does a lot of things with DNA, trying to make different engineered proteins, with this demonstration we can show people how you can take the DNA out of fruit so hopefully it will be fun and inspire the children to be a part of this,” Lan said.

Shaz Rasul, executive director of student civic engagement initiatives and interim director of the University Community Service Center, said the idea of a science fest came from junior UChicago faculty. Encouraged by his office to talk to community stakeholders to get a sense of what people wanted/needed/were interested in, he said the faculty spent the good part of a year listening before starting work on it in the middle of spring.

“This started during the lockdown in 2020,” said Sarah King, Neubauer Family assistant professor at UChicago. I’m good friends with Hannes Bernien (assistant professor of molecular engineering) and Maanasa Raghavan (Neubauer Family assistant professor of human genetics), all three of us were talking on Zoom about ways that we can interface more with our local community and get them excited, curious about science, as a way to improve our relationship with the community and also help general science education and science literacy in the general population.”

Having seen the impact of Europe’s “Long Night of Sciences,” as a spring festival where universities and research institutions in Germany open their doors to the public to learn about what academics and researchers are working on, the trio wanted to do something similar.

“You can go to a science concert, go to a science-based comedy thing,” King said. “And it is intentionally for all ages ... not just school-aged kids, but also for young adults who are in the formative years of thinking about their relationship with the world, and how science fits into that. And it’s their parents who are making complicated decisions about something in medicine or what car to buy, or what type of heating system to put on their house, which at the end of the day, those are all questions that are related back to science, and how you think about the world.

“Those are questions that we as scientists think a lot about, and we want to help people think about those questions. But most importantly, also talk to our community about what are the things you’re thinking about? What are your problems? It’s a two-way street helping our research be more relevant to people and then having people have a better understanding of science in their daily lives.”

The South Side Science Festival, co-organized by UChicago’s physical science division, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and the biological sciences division, also served as an aid in science communication, Rasul said.

“If we want the sciences to be inclusive, we have to be able to talk about them so that people at all stages in their development can connect,” he said. “There’s a lot of energy around the sciences right now and a lot of it’s around new technologies like quantum science and biotech or clean energy. There’s a real hope that if we do things differently, that all of the advancements in these new technologies can be inclusive from the start.

“And we can involve communities in that whole process. Research says that people want to feel a connection to the sciences — they want to meet the scientist, they want to understand how you become a scientist. It’s especially important to us that we try to make those invisible pathways really visible because we want more diversity in the sciences. You need to have a connection in order to want to take a chance in it.”

King hopes the South Side Science Festival becomes an annual event, connecting it to local community colleges and high schools. She’s particularly interested in the 15 to 25 age group, which is where she said “people become too cool for science” or think that science isn’t for them.

“Understanding the sciences starts with fun and excitement,” said Bernien. “I think that’s what we are here to create.”

drockett@chicagotribune.com

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