One more time the research group in Tissue Repair and Regeneration (TR2Lab) of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health Sciences of Central Catalonia (IRIS-CC) since last July, has successfully organized the Biomedicine Workshops for high school students in the Biosciences laboratories of the Faculty of Science, Technology, and Engineering. This year’s workshops were: “Experimental analysis of human serum proteins by electrophoresis” and “Experimental analysis of human DNA by PCR”.

TR2Lab has been offering Biomedicine Workshops for high schools since the 2015/2016 academic year and, since then, more than 800 high school students have attended them. Once again, the students and teachers who have attended consider that the two strong points of these workshops are, on the one hand, the content of the activity which fits very well into the Biology and Biomedicine subjects in the scientific-technical and biosanitary curricula. On the other hand, the research experience of the teaching staff. The two teachers that gave the workshops were Dr. Laia Bosch, associate professor at the Faculty of Health and Welfare Sciences, and Dr. Bet Sarri, full professor at the Faculty of Medicine. Both researchers of the IRIS-CC and currently active in biomedical research carried out within the framework of the UVIC-UCC.

The main objective of these experimental activities is to establish a bridge between high school science education and university degrees. Doing experimental workshops on the high school curriculum in a real university context is ideal for achieving this. It also becomes a useful platform for disseminating biomedical science and fostering scientific vocations,  as well as conveying curiosities and research initiatives of high school students.

This year we highlight that some of the groups came by using the R3 commuter-Renfe line, showing that public transport such as the train is a strategic key to promoting the UVIC-UCC‘s role in research and knowledge.