Biotech: Transforming the Life Sciences

The NC Biotech industry is booming!  In recent years venture capitalists have invested more than $22 billion in Research Triangle Park!  Our NCSSM Early Accelerators will interview scientists that are engineering living organisms or parts of cells to solve our most compelling  health and agricultural challenges.  Throughout the week we will observe, collect, and study our campus’ urban wildlife from microbiology to macro fauna.  Our final project will be a collective effort to explore current threats to humanity, the opportunities for biotech, the inherent ethical dilemmas, and imagine possible future solutions.

Shannon Russell Hardy is an 8th/9th grade Math I, II teacher with certification in math, social studies, ELA, gifted, National Boards, and an M. Ed in Educational Leadership. She has participated in teacher exchanges in Russia, Japan, Belize, and Germany. She led The Exploris School’s application for the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Green Ribbon and co-designed a 10-part series for EdNC on utility savings in k-12 schools. Since 2017 she has been particularly interested in student-designed projects in collaboration with Design for Change, NCSU’s Design & Pitch, and Project Invent. In 2019 her students participated in a Youth Summit in Rome where they were recognized by Pope Frances for their work to end racism. Hardy is one of the co-founders of the Wake County Truth and Reconciliation Committee and continues to work with her students to reveal our community’s hard history about lynching and segregation. Her “Red Wolf Project” was featured in a webinar by PBLWorks, and in 2021 her students presented their environmental and social justice projects in PBL24+ and Singapore’s Be the Change Youth Summit. She was recently featured in two new books by Corwin Press: Worldwise Learning: A Teacher’s Guide to a Just, Sustainable World and Open Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students. A 2022-23 Kenan Teacher Fellow, she is a gritty catalyst for curiosity, and was thrilled by the students’ questions and experiments in last summer’s Early Accelerator Biotech camp. This summer promises to be even better for our next group of rising 5th and 6th graders!