FTHS BioScience Academy Partnerships

PARTERNSHIPS

The greatest key to building our future health care professionals and scientists is to give them as much exposure to the real world that awaits them as possible. It is our hope to develop meaningful partnerships with as many local facilities as possible in order to inspire high school students to pursue careers that would someday allow them to come back and work at these facilities.

FoothillTechnology High School’s BioScience Academy is privileged to be working with some phenomenal partners in our community:

• Ventura County Medical Center - Ventura County Medical Center and its many associated clinics has opened its doors to our students enabling them to have unprecedented first hand experiences at the side of talented physicians and nurses who take the time to explain what they are doing. Students are able to job shadow in numerous locations in the hospital and in clinics and in so doing, are being inspired to pursue the long academic road that is necessary to prepare them to someday be the professionals they are observing. We publicly thank Dr. John Fankhauser, the medical director at VCMC, who, along with the staff at VCMC, have welcomed our students into their world and opened their eyes to the world of health care. Coastal Marine Biolabs (CMB) offers unique, research-based educational programs for high school students. CMB’s interdisciplinary programs complement and expand the academic knowledge that students’ derive from their formal education, and provide opportunities for them to apply this knowledge in pursuit of contemporary research questions.

• Coastal Marine BioLabs - Wendi Butler and Darcy Perez have been working with CMB Co-founders, Dr. Ralph Imondi and Dr. Linda Santschi, to facilitate the involvement of Ventura Unified School District teachers/students in the International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) - the largest biodiversity genomics project ever undertaken. Over the last two years, more than 200 students (including many Foothill students!) representing 18 California cities have joined a scientific campaign to create a DNA barcode library for the fish and invertebrate species that inhabit the waters of the Channel Islands National Park and Marine Sanctuary.

  DNA barcoding is a digital identification system that uses a short segment of a mitochondrial reference gene to distinguish animal species. Through their participation in the project, students will assist in the identification of target marine specimens and apply accessible and straightforward molecular biology-based techniques and bioinformatics routines to generate reference DNA barcodes (e.g. genomic DNA extraction, gel electrophoresis, polymerase chain reaction, spin column purification of PCR amplicons, sequence editing, etc.). Importantly, these high school students receive authorship for their contribution of genetic data to this landmark scientific initiative. Real science – done by high school kids!!

• Life Source Technologies – We are investigating a partnership with them currently. They have provided many amazing speakers from many departments in their company as well as a great deal of donated equipment that is being heavily used in our biotechnology lab.

• Baxters BioScience has opened its doors to students for an intensive job shadow experience over the last few years and have sent us several wonderful speakers.

• Ventura County Red Cross – we have received CPR training as well as psychological first aid training from some wonderful Red Cross volunteers. In addition, they have served as assessors during our Multiple Casualty Simulation and Disease Projects.

There have been many dozens of professionals from all areas of Ventura County who have participated in our program by speaking or assessing projects.

• Community Members – There have been many dozens of professionals from all areas of Ventura County who have participated in our program by speaking or assessing projects.