Ciliate researchers,

As many of you know, we recently received an NIH NCCR Science Education Partnership Award
(ASSET – Advancing Secondary Science Education through Tetrahymena) to develop Tetrahymena
as an integral teaching tool for middle and high school students. To accompany our outreach
program, we are also developing a companion page on our website for the program which will
allow students and teachers to communicate with others using Tetrahymena.

As part of that website, we want to put a face to ciliate research, and provide students with a
forum where they can ask real scientists ciliate related scientific questions. We are looking for
scientists who are willing to be featured on our website as experts in various research fields
utilizing Tetrahymena or other ciliates. We will put everything together. All we need from you are
the following:
1) Permission to lift material from your websites to incorporate into our researcher list.
2) Willingness to answer an occasional ciliate related e-mail question from a student using
Tetrahymena in his/her classroom. These questions would be submitted to our website and
filtered by us prior to being sent to you (so no spam).  Students would never have direct access to
your e-mail address. We will limit the number of questions per scientist so no one is overly
burdened. Of course, you could pass on answering any question at any time.

Additionally, we hope to encourage students to think of science as a career. To encourage that, we
want them to see scientists as people, and to get a small glimpse of the person behind the
resume.  We have selected three questions which students can relate to, and which we hope will
encourage them to recognize that science attracts real people, with all types of personalities.
Another webpage on our site will list the classroom teachers participating in the project and they
will be asked these same questions.  The questions are:

-What’s on your iPod right now?

-If you were a contestant on TOP CHEF, what recipe would you choose to win the contest?

-If you hadn’t chosen science as  a career, you would now be a world famous……?

Of course you can answer all or just some of the questions.  Although they may seem frivolous,
students are fascinated by this type of information about people they view as different from
themselves.

We encourage and welcome all participants, but we are especially interested in scientists from
groups generally underrepresented in the scientific community.

Please let us know if you are interested in participating simply by replying to
[log in to unmask] . Just indicate it is okay for us to use information from your
website and answer the above 3 questions.
Of course, if you would like more information, let us know. We would love to share more details
about our project with anyone interested.

We hope you will participate, and help us encourage middle and high school students to take an
active interest in science and the interplay of science and society.

Thank you.

The SEPA ASSET Staff

Ted Clark, Director

Donna Cassidy-Hanley, Co-Director

Fern Siew, Biology Coordinator

Chuck Hanley, Biology and Society Coordinator