When you work in scientific research, it can be a challenge to explain your job to your family, your friends, and – perhaps most of all – your kids. Recently, we invited more than 200 students ages 4-15 to join our colleagues at our Cambridge, MA R&D center to do just that – showing, rather than telling, the next generation of STEM leaders about the wonderful world of science.
Donning kid-sized lab coats and goggles, colleagues’ children, relatives, and neighbors participated in a range of experiments and activities, including extracting DNA from a strawberry, molecular modeling, and making heart pumps. Students ages 12-15 gained a better understanding of the R&D process by playing our “The Long Road to Drug Discovery” Game, simulating the challenges, time investments, costs, and risks associated with developing new medicines and vaccines.
“As a parent, you want to pass on to the next generation concern about the people around them, the diseases that affect us, and how we can all try to find solutions,” shared Deepa Elizabeth Chandra, a Research Project Lead at Pfizer who attended with her children.
Check out some of the highlights from the day:
