Bucket Brigade

Roberta Diaz Brinton lights a fire so that science burns bright in the minds of elementary school students.

by Monika Guttman

 

Roberta Diaz Brinton, Ph.D., jumps up and down with a microphone in her hand, her white lab coat flying, to demonstrate that light waves have a top and a bottom. The 120 third-graders in the auditorium at Murchison Elementary School in East Los Angeles laugh long and loud.

But no one is laughing at the results of Brinton’s foray into teaching science at the elementary school level. The USC neuroscientist and professor of molecular pharmacology at the USC School of Pharmacy—recently identified as one of the best minds in science today by U.S. News & World Report—is working hard to inspire the minds of tomorrow. Her tactic: what she calls a “science bucket brigade.”

Brinton—who hails from a working-class New Jersey neighborhood—has been convincing inner-city high school students that a career in science is not only exciting, it is within reach. For the past 15 years she has volunteered as the director of the USC STAR (Science, Technology And Research) program, in which USC scientists and graduate students in 50 different research labs on both the Health Sciences and University Park campuses mentor high school students, bringing them into the labs and overseeing their science research projects for school. She tells the young people, “If I can become a scientist, so can you.”

The tactic works: More than 500 students have participated, and all have gone on to attend four-year colleges, including USC, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, and Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities.

Now Brinton has started the bucket brigade, which means USC graduate, undergraduate and STAR students serve as mentors to the elementary school students. “It’s like the old-fashioned bucket brigades when there was a fire,” she explains. “I fill a bucket, pass it to you, and you pass it on. That’s the way you put out fires.”

Or, in this case, start them—in the minds of kids who have no science books and no science resources, let alone ambitions of conducting experiments in a research lab. With hands-on class projects that focus on such subjects as energy, matter, cells and the senses, the student mentors, along with Brinton, show the Murchison Elementary kids that scientific discovery can be fun and interesting. In addition, the mentors take the third-graders to science fairs and help them design experiments. The result, says Brinton, is that everybody wins.

Not content to stop the brigade there, Brinton plans for the current crop of third-graders to serve as mentors to students of next year’s class, who will then mentor the following class and so on. She also is linking Murchison Elementary to various science labs, so scientists can mentor via the Internet, continuing to expand on the children’s interest in science and the process of discovery.

On this day, however, Brinton herself is the star attraction. She explains her work of developing complicated estrogen molecules as the work of scientists who “make medicine that will make people feel better.” She leads the kids through what can only be described as a scientific pep rally, her enthusiasm catching. “Who wants to be a scientist?” she cries out at the end. Every hand in the auditorium shoots upward.