Funded Projects

Project title:
Research Experience in Life Sciences for High School Girls from Jordan Disadvantaged Regions
Period: 2023-2024
Funding agency: International Cell Research Organization (ICRO)-UNESCO
The project aims to expose high school girls (14-16 years) to the broad range of research areas in Life Sciences. The targeted participants are from disadvantaged regions around the Hashemite University (Jordan) from the city of Al-Mafraq, where opportunities for wet lab experience are limited if existent. The project that spans 6 weeks during the summer, distributes 10 girls to 10 different labs, some are run by a female principal investigator, who work on different aspects of Life Sciences.
The different projects teach the students how to derive hypothesis, design a project and analyze results, and to effectively explain their project and results to their peers, undergraduate students, and professors in oral and written format. This will give these high school girls the opportunity to learn about the modern techniques in Life Sciences, introduce them to female role models, and most importantly encourage them to remove the barriers (personal, and societal) that hinder them from engaging in science as a future career. This in turn will translate the rise in women educational attainment into labor force participation.

Project title: Exploring the world through a microscope- Diversity in Science Grant
Period: 2023-2024
Funding agency: Biochemical Society, UK
The project aims to introduce high school girls from the northwest Badia (desert) region, Mafraq, Jordan, to the world of cells and microscopy.
We go around girls’ high schools in the region carrying a brightfield microscope, microscope slides, coverslips, cell stains such as methylene blue, onions, and toothpicks, to show these girls animal and plant cells under the microscope.
We teach the girls how to prepare a wet mount sample of inner cheek cells using a toothpick and how to stain these cells as an example of animal cells, and how to prepare plant cells using onion peels/skin and a dye.