Coming full circle: Angie gives back to science program that changed her life

Kelcy Dolan
Posted 10/1/15

By KELCY DOLAN

During her junior year of high school at Vets, Angela “Angie” Marcks wasn’t sure what her future plans were. She was good at track and thought, maybe, she would become a gym …

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Coming full circle: Angie gives back to science program that changed her life

Posted

By KELCY DOLAN

During her junior year of high school at Vets, Angela “Angie” Marcks wasn’t sure what her future plans were. She was good at track and thought, maybe, she would become a gym teacher, but she is the type of person to change her mind often.

That is until she was introduced to the Amgen Biotech Experience through her biotechnology course during junior and senior year.

For the past 25 years ABE has provided high schools across the country with professional development and science kits with approximately $25,000 worth of high quality lab equipment and teaching materials for a month at a time.

With ABE, Angie began to fall in love with science, even staying after school to work on any of the eight experiments in the kit.

“Every day it was something new; I was never bored,” Angie said. “It was just so interesting to see how to manipulate organisms and the genome to have them do almost anything you wanted.”

Now Angie, 20, is in her junior year of her undergraduate career at the University of Rhode Island, majoring in medical laboratory science. Through a grant from Amgen, URI is the local facilitator of the ABE program and has received $850,000 in the past nine years. Each year more than 50,000 students nationwide benefit from the program. For Rhode Island, 60 ABE educators from nearly 40 schools are expected to reach nearly 4,000 students this year.

In December 2013, Angie began working for URI, in the Feinstein Providence Campus, under an Amgen grant and has since been preparing and assembling the same kit that sparked her own interest in science for high school students across the state.

Gregory Paquette, professor and director of biotechnology and principal investigator for the ABE program, said preparing the kits is very labor intensive because all the molecules and bacteria have to be prepared before they are sent to any of the schools. He says not only is this program enhancing the classes at the high school level, but it has also been and continues to be a great program for fostering a love for science and the STEM industry in students.

“Angie is a perfect example,” he said. “This program gives students that ‘aha’ experience, showing them that science can be cool and exciting.”

He said that the STEM industry is “the growth industry,” but currently there is a “supply and demand problem” as graduating high school students aren’t prepared enough or interested enough in STEM fields. He said where traditional science classrooms could be “stale” the ABE program is hands-on with real world applications.

In those schools using ABE, Paquette has received nothing but positive feedback from teachers and students. He has found that in those schools that use ABE, both interest and understanding of science increases dramatically in students.

“The labs are similar to the things Amgen does every day, just on a grander scale,” he said.

Jennifer Bianco, head of corporate affairs for Amgen said the ABE program is to spark an interest and love of science in students to “create the next generation of scientists.”

She said that there aren’t enough students interested in the field, and Amgen wanted to show students just how powerful science can really be. Although Amgen doesn’t expect every student to become a scientist after going through the “scientific literacy” program, they believe a general love for science and innovation, a foundation of critical thinking, can benefit students in every aspect of their life.

“It’s amazing and rewarding to be a part of an organization that gets kids to think differently. These students don’t automatically come to work for us, but this is just the right thing to do,” Bianco said. “Especially when there is so much opportunity in the biotech industry.”

A growing and promising industry is one of the reasons Angie became interested in biotechnology.

Paquette said, in all STEM subjects, but especially biotechnology, we have “barely scratched the surface of what is possible.”

“Hang on to your hat because the next five to ten years are going to be exciting,” he said. “Biotech has cured diseases we once thought impossible. It’s a whole new universe.”

As she works closely with teachers and professors, Angie thinks she would like to go into teaching after her collegiate career.

“I want to inspire others in the same way my teachers inspired me,” she said. “It’s really rewarding for me because now I feel I have come full circle. Now it’s time to get others excited about science.”

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