Welcome to Brookings Area Scientists In Schools (BrASIS)
Brookings Area Scientists In Schools (BRASIS) is an outreach program designed, launched and managed by Dr. Willand-Charnley and the Willand-Charnley Lab scientists (undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral). Collectively, a small cohort visit classrooms to perform hands on, inquiry based, chemistry experiments with students.
What is the societal benefit of the BrASIS program?
Intellectual diversity is the key to the advancement of science; it is integral to our problem-solving success for the betterment of society. Yet, from K-12 and into higher education the percentage of underrepresented minorities that remain within STEM and pursue STEM related careers declines due to the lack of “science identity” at young ages, the ability to see oneself as a scientist. Young women, for example begin to lose interest in science between the ages of 11-15 due to the lack of role models at an earlier age and consistently throughout their time in academia. More concerning is that interest in STEM fields doesn’t recover. STEM intervention outreach programs are the solution. Thus, through hands-on educational experiences involving a diverse cohort of scientists, the program offers an avenue to ensure increased science identity.
Dr. Willand-Charnley’s Prior Outreach Experience
Dr. Willand-Charnley is an applied interdisciplinary organic glycol-cancer immunologist. They received their B.S. at Creighton University and their Ph.D. (in chemistry) at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln) under the direction of Prof. Patrick Dassault. They went on to become a NIH NIGMS Institutional Research and Academic Career Award fellow at Stanford University, under the direction of Nobel Laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, the goal of which was to increase diversity into the STEM sciences via diversification of pedagogical practices to communicate science to a diverse audience. Additionally, they were also a EPSCoR Communicating Science to the Public fellow in which they developed experiments for K-5 students.
Aside from fellowships focused on increasing diversity into the STEM sciences. During their time at both the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University they were a Bay Area Scientist in Schools (BrASIS). BrASIS, like BrASIS, developed hands on experiments that were performed with and in K-5 classrooms throughout the Bay Area. In addition, they developed the K-5 outreach program that became integrated into Stanford University’s Inspiring Future Scientist (IFS) outreach program. They worked with Dr. Schwartz-Poehlmann to implement this component of the program. They bring their wealth of experience to the Brookings and surrounding communities.
The Willand-Charnley Lab
The Willand-Charnley Lab consists of interdisciplinary applied organic chemists, glycobiologists and cancer immunologists. The lab’s overall objective is to identify chronic biological problem facing society and generate solutions synergistically through both the lab’s organic chemistry and biochemistry programs resulting in cross-disciplinary research, insights, and scientists, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. Currently the Willand-Charnley lab has three areas of focus because of our objective: 1. elucidate glycan related biochemical mechanisms of action, 2. Glycan related synthetic methods development, and 3. Glycan related therapeutic development. Concerning biochemical mechanisms of action, the lab is focused on understanding how cancers utilize functionalized sugar residues, specifically Sialic Acid (Figure 1A), to participate in tumorigenic processes, metastasis, immune evasion, multidrug resistance, and more recently how that altered communication extends to other members of the immune system by decreasing the release of cytokines and chemokines (Figure 1B), resulting in increasing cancer’s survival (Fig 1C). The lab has identified a critical functional group alteration, deacetylation (Figure 1A), on Sialic acid that allows colon and lung cancers to evade the immune system, participate in multi-drug resistance, and engage in metastatic processes with various cellular members of the immune system. The need for facile and robust synthetic methods surrounding Sialic acid was recognized early in the organic program, as such we began developing the foundational methods (Figure 1D) in which we are building upon today to synthesize -sialylated glycosidic linkages (Figure 1D), spirolactone and cycles (Figure 1E). Being at the intersect of chemistry and biology allows the lab the unique advantage of developing therapeutics and testing those therapeutics to address the critical need in house and with assurance. The lab has three ongoing projects in the realm of therapeutic development two involving cancer and one in chemical warfare. Concerning cancer, the lab has been working on two enzyme-antibody conjugates that target lung and colon cancers, altering the functional groups on their cell’s surface exposing them to the immune mediated killing (Figure 1G). In addition, the lab is finalizing the synthesis of a therapeutic involving a derivative of cisplatin (Figure 1H) that will be entering in vitro testing. Lastly, we identified a novel therapeutic in which to treat sulfur mustard poisoning that is now moving to in vivo models (Figure 1I).