When you read the Acknowledgements section of the Global Urban Evolution (GLUE) project article in Science, you’ll see “Shad Mount Allison” listed among those who made important contributions to the project. Here’s the story how Shad Mount Allison became involved, and the important contribution they made.
The GLUE project brought professional biologists and non-scientists of all walks together to contribute to a global collaborative experiment. The Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada GLUE effort was one such case: forty-eight high school students from around Canada helped put Moncton on the GLUE map. My name is Emily Austen, and as the Moncton GLUE team lead, I had the privilege of working with these youth.
I signed up to sample Moncton at a transition point in my life: I was preparing to begin my new faculty position at Mount Allison University in Sackville NB (a small town about 30 minutes from Moncton), and I was expecting my first child. I didn’t have a lab space yet, let alone people in a lab to help with the GLUE sampling. But I wanted my new home to be represented in this global collaboration.
I figured I could bring the baby along while I collected plants. But I couldn’t fathom how I would run the HCN assays for the > 600 plants I was supposed to collect. And it seemed a shame not to bring more people into the project.
Fortunately, 2018 was not only the year of GLUE sampling, but also Mount Allison University’s inaugural year as a Shad Canada campus. Shad is a month-long program that brings together exceptional grade 10 and grade 11 students from across Canada for an immersive, hands-on experience in arts, sciences, engineering, entrepreneurship and community building. I thought, what could be more immersive and hands-on than carrying out data collection for a real-world global experiment? The Shad Mount Allison Program Co-Directors (Erin Penney and Bobby Sorba) and the GLUE lead team agreed, and the GLUE Moncton – Shad Mount Allison collaboration was born.
I can’t stress enough: the Shad participants (“Shads”) were instrumental to completing the HCN assays for GLUE Moncton. Over the course of a single morning, the Shads learned about the project, and then worked as a team to complete the HCN assays for all 757 plants I had sampled from the streets of Moncton. I was so impressed by the seriousness with which they took the task, the enthusiasm they showed for contributing to scientific discovery, and the remarkable teamwork they exhibited. Every single Shad had a role to play – an assay plate to prepare, a list to check, or a responsibility to collect plates for the incubator – and each one did the work with care and pride. Anyone would be lucky to work with – or for – these youths in their future careers.
The GLUE project clearly gained immensely from the careful work of these students. But I hope the Shad participants gained from the experience, too. I recently chatted with Erin, one of the Shad Mount Allison Co-Directors, about what the project meant to the students.
For most of the Shads, the GLUE project was their first taste of real-world science and the scientific process. Through GLUE, the students learned about how one finding (a rural-urban HCN cline in three cities) leads to new questions (how repeatable, on a global scale, is the evolution of an urban-rural HCN cline?). They gained some hands-on lab experience and practiced careful lab note taking and data collection. And they saw that science is truly for everyone: we can all make meaningful contributions to scientific discovery. Plus, having your first real-world science experience land on the cover of Science is special, to say the least!
But Erin pointed out that perhaps the biggest benefit of GLUE participation was that it indisputably showed how big projects can be accomplished with a lot of people each contributing a smaller part. The intended outcomes of Shad include “Discover the value of collaborating.” Certainly the unprecedented scale of the GLUE collaboration will have helped the students see themselves as part of the larger whole of science.
With the paper now out in Science, I hope each of the 2018 Mount Allison Shads recognizes that they are a part of the discovery that has been accomplished. Moncton would not be in GLUE without them. To each and every 2018 Mount Allison Shad participant and staff member: Thank you.