When Specimen Choice Wags the Microscopy Education Dog

The use of microscope technology has proved to be foundational in the global advancement of science and medicine. However, fewer women are entering science and microscopy as a career. Many factors have been suggested for this decades-old trend, yet intense mentoring of female students by successful women in academia and industry may be reversing the trend. Our team designed a STEM microscopy curriculum in a mobile laboratory format to test the idea that more female students might show an interest in STEM training if they have a chance to operate a microscope. The interest in dinosaur remains is very high among secondary students, thus we reasoned that choosing dinosaur tissue remains as a specimen might attract such students to hands-on labs. Here we describe our efforts to attract female students to microscopy-related STEM content by using dinosaur soft tissue from our dinosaur digs as specimens during our hands-on microscope labs. We conducted 33 such labs in six states across the US over a 16-month period. Female student participation was over 52%. We suggest that the specimen choice (particularly dinosaur cells, veins, and nerves) in microscopy education provides a powerful incentive to female students to consider a science as a career.