When high school biology teacher Laura Austen introduces Cornell graduate student Jennifer Weiser to her classes this fall, she hopes Weiser will not only teach the teenagers something about biomedical engineering, but also about being a "real" scientist.

"This is not a funny-looking guy in a white coat," Austen said.

Weiser, a third-year biomedical engineering graduate student, and Austen, a teacher in the Elmira City School District, are one of 10 pairings in Cornell's Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) Program, a National Science Foundation-funded outreach initiative launched earlier this year.

A five-year, $3 million grant is allowing middle and high school science teachers from rural school districts to assist the biomedical engineering graduate students, called GK-12 fellows, with a research project this summer directly related to the fellows' research. During the upcoming school year, the fellows will, in turn, periodically visit the teachers' classrooms to help with specific lesson plans and show students what they do as scientists.

This summer, Austen has been spending nearly every day in the Weill Hall lab where Weiser works under David Putnam, associate professor of biomedical engineering, to develop new biomaterials for medical applications. Together, Austen and Weiser have made pellets of a polymer derived from dihydroxyacetone and lactic acid, placed them in a spinning liquid buffer and observed how they degraded over time. The observations could provide insights into whether the unique material design would be useful for such biomedical applications as preventing tissue adhesions or as an agent to stop bleeding.

Austen said she was happy for the opportunity to do "real" science and take the experience back to her biology classroom.

"I had very little knowledge about what's going on in the biomedical engineering field," she said. "It was an abstract kind of thing. Now I've got a lot more in-depth understanding of what's really happening."

Weiser was attracted to the program because she had always wanted to learn more about teaching science, not just doing it.

"I thought it was an interesting opportunity to take this biomedical knowledge and all the things I've accumulated over the years and bring it back to high school," said Weiser, a chemical engineer by training who worked previously at a pharmaceutical company.

The fellows and teachers are working on lesson plans for the classroom driven by the concept of inquiry-based learning, which is when students learn by asking questions and coming to their own conclusions. The method, emphasized by the New York state curriculum, deviates from the traditional rote memorization and "chalk and talk" method of teaching science, Austen said.

"If kids think about something and ask questions about something, it stays in their memory," Austen said. "And science is the perfect venue to teach this inquiry-based learning."

Weiser hopes to help the students most during the lab portion of Austen's classes this year. The two have already planned out new ways to teach the genetics unit in Austen's classes, letting the students try gel electrophoresis, a method of separating DNA or proteins with an electrical current.

The GK-12 program also requires the teachers and fellows to present posters on their research project findings, and to attend seminars on inquiry-driven learning and the cutting edges of biomedical engineering research.