Last Saturday, March 12, the Ragon Institute hosted the first-ever meeting of the PRISM (Program of Ragon and IMES in Science and Medicine) Science Club for high school students. The PRISM Science Club provides opportunities for high school students from underrepresented communities in the Greater Boston area to learn about cutting-edge medical science and careers in STEM. This year, 21 students from Boston, Cambridge, Brockton, Chelsea, and Revere have been accepted into the program.

The PRISM Science Club is a joint effort between the Ragon Institute, MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), housed at IMES. Each week features a different program, with a talk, discussion and an activity. The club is facilitated by five graduate students from IMES/HST.

In the first session on March 12, students learned about cardiac physiology from MIT PhD candidate Kim Lamberti and built a working EKG to measure sinus rhythm. There was also a Q&A session with Kay Everett, MD, PhD, a clinical research fellow in cardiovascular disease at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Everett talked about her career path as a woman in medical research and some of the challenges she’s faced, and gave words of encouragement to the students.

The club runs for 8 Saturdays, from March 12–April 30. Next week, students will visit Bruce Walker’s lab to learn about T cell immunology.