My Home, My Health: Place-Based Public Health Resources for Rural Educators - The proposed project, My Home, My Health: Place-Based Public Health Resources for Rural Educators, will address future bioscience workforce needs by engaging rural youth, enhancing the teaching skills of informal educators, and leveraging the expertise and research of Montana's NIH-supported scientists. Montana State University in partnership with two tribal colleges -- Salish Kootenai College and Blackfeet Community College -- and researchers of the Montana IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), will build a model for how INBRE networks can train their researchers to create outreach kits with the communities they serve in order to reach youth. Additionally, the project will draw upon the expertise and community contacts of the NIH-funded American Indian / Alaska Native Clinical & Translational Research Program (AI/AN CTRP). My Home, My Health will create a series of hands-on, place-based activity kits that focus on a broad definition of disease ecology, encompassing a multidimensional picture of the interplay between abiotic conditions and multiple pathogens and hosts interacting within a whole ecosystem. The project addresses the NIH goal to foster a better understanding of biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research and its implications by engaging communities to create regionally relevant hands-on activities that will help to attract younger audiences to STEM, allow youth to gain and practice STEM skills pertinent to bioscience professions, and enhance educator professional development. The project team will seek exemplary practices to improve STEM learning outcomes that can be measured, replicated, and disseminated. The project includes INBRE tribal college researchers from the Blackfeet and Flathead Reservations, as well as middle school educators recruited from around the state. My Home, My Health will train 30 INBRE researchers (undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty) in science communication and outreach, enabling them to help design and pilot the kits with youth. The project team will also train 50 middle school educators on how to utilize the project's lessons, thereby enhancing their content knowledge of disease ecology. In total, the project will impact 2,260 youth, 50 educators, and 30 early-career and established researchers. After the SEPA grant is completed, the project model will become part of Montana INBRE's future training and outreach efforts. INBRE will utilize and lend out the kits to educators throughout the state and continue to develop new kits.
