2025-26 School Year ISB Education Highlights

Fall 2025

We Appreciate Your Participation and Generosity at Ignite STEM

Ignite STEM lit up ISB on November 6! Our lobby was overflowing with students, educators, ISB faculty and staff, and supporters who gathered to celebrate 25 years of ISB’s education programs.

During the first hour, guests roamed among balloon-marked stations to hear stories from students, teachers, school district leaders, and STEM professionals — each sharing how ISB programs have shaped their learning and careers.

If you missed the event or want to relive the highlights, check out this slide deck of moments from the evening.

The sit-down program featured remarks from Mary Brunkow, who reflected on the educators and mentors who shaped her Nobel Prize-winning journey, and Angie Di Loreto, this year’s Valerie Logan Leadership in Science Education Award recipient, who shared her 25-year partnership with ISB and the Bellevue School District.

Jake Valenzuela led an engaging discussion on the importance of science education, invited guests to share their own ISB connections, and delivered the evening’s fundraising appeal. Jim Heath, Lee Hood, and Nitin Baliga offered remarks tying ISB’s research and education missions together.

The Education team — Claudia Ludwig, Jen Eklund, and Caroline Kiehle — extends their gratitude to everyone who contributed to a successful event, with special thanks to the Development, Facilities, Communications, and Faculty teams.

10 interns across five ISB labs are completing research

Eight local high school students and two undergraduates are researching in a variety of areas of systems biology in the Baliga, Huang, Kane, Moritz, and Venkatash labs. Above, interns Jessica Jin, left, and Sanjna Sikka are pictured working on a laser-activated speaker at ISB.

It is relatively unusual for ISB to host so many interns during the school year. However, this year, numerous students had release time for internships, and mentors had suitable projects and bandwidth. These students will wrap up their projects by June 2026 in time for our next cohort of students to arrive for new summer research experiences.

Systems Medicine Course Materials In Demand

Seven high schools, representing nearly 300 high school juniors and seniors, are currently using our Systems Medicine 4-module series. Since we began field testing these materials, we have reached over 1,000 students across 12 school districts. 

In October, we presented instructional materials from our Personalizing Disease Treatments module at the National Association for Biology Teachers, thanks to our partner EmbiTec/MiniOne. This and previous dissemination efforts are resulting in teachers in other states using materials. 

We are also supporting teachers through a monthly Professional Learning Community. ISB faculty member Sid Venkatash presented to the group of teachers on 12/3/2025 to provide examples of how nutritional and cystic fibrosis systems medicine research is progressing.

Our Newest Curriculum Module Is a Big Hit

This fall, teacher Wendy Whitmer of Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, Wash., field tested our module, Microplastics in the Arctic: Mega Problem? with her two Biology classes. Below are a few standout quotes from 9th and 10th graders.

In October, we presented in Tacoma at the Washington State Teachers’ Association conference and got many other teachers up and going with this engaging, hands-on module. In total, we’re working with 16 teachers to field test the module in middle and high school classrooms this year. Feedback has been very positive and helpful as we optimize and finalize the lessons’ content. 

Quotes in response to, “What did you like about this unit? What worked for you?”

• I liked that we got lots of days to work on a big project with a partner and that we got to use the lab.
• I liked all of it, and it all worked for me.
• What I liked about this experiment is that you could clearly see that the ice froze at different temperatures.
• It was pretty interesting to learn about all this stuff.
• I really loved learning about the causes and effects of the environments in the Arctic. It really encouraged me to do my part and have ideas about the Arctic Ocean. I also enjoyed the lab experiments.
• I liked the parts where we found potential solutions and in the lab things because it really showed what was going on.
• I liked learning about the impact we have on the world around us, and the labs worked very well to help me learn.
• I liked working on an actual project, instead of just working on a worksheet or a packet, and that worked for me, so that I’m not doing the same boring, less interactive thing over a few days.
• I have liked researching and learning all about the Arctic and microplastics, and what I can do to help.

Supporting Local School Systems to Launch the New Academic Year

ISB Education ran a workshop at the Puyallup School District‘s back-to-school institute. A group of secondary teachers from the science, math, social studies, and English departments worked together to explore student practices across the curriculum. The workshop gave teachers a practical experience in how to help their students see all the practices — the skills for doing science as a scientist would. Teachers then searched for overlaps in the other courses, generating a powerful set of practices that their students might be doing across their courses on any given day at high school. 

ISB Education is running a yearlong series, year four, in the Central Kitsap School District.  In October, all high school science teachers analyzed big data sets of students’ reflections on their learning — the n=2,000 students at each of four timepoints over two years. This is a powerful view of science teaching and learning, from which the teachers established professional growth goals for our collaborative work this year.