Arunan: Mentoring Future Scientists
August 2014
BASIS volunteer and Steering Committee member, Arunan Skandarajah, shares his experience in the classroom and in research.
Arunan Skandarajah is a fifth year PhD student in the joint UC Berkeley/ UCSF Bioengineering program. Introduced to BASIS in his first year grad student seminar, Arunan now serves on the BASIS Steering Committee, which functions as the leadership arm to plan programs and events for Cal volunteers.
Arunan has always been amazed by what science and engineering can explain. He has been involved in a number of science education outreach programs in order to share his passion with kids and educators alike.
In addition to volunteering with BASIS, Arunan taught with VSVS (Vanderbilt Students Volunteering for Science) during his undergraduate career at Vanderbilt University and was a part of STEP (Science Technology Engineering Policy Group) at UC Berkeley. He has also been a scientist in Oakland’s Dinner with a Scientist Events.
Arunan has been an important player in expanding the BASIS middle school program beyond Piedmont Middle School. In his third year of volunteering for BASIS, his team of bioengineering graduate students collaborated on an 8th grade lesson for Berkeley’s Willard Middle School. The lesson, which boasts rave reviews from both teachers and students alike, is about optics and each student builds kaleidoscope at the end. In fact, Arunan and his team are so popular the students invited them to play basketball during recess after one of their morning presentations.
One of Arunan’s favorite parts of BASIS is working with his fellow volunteers to develop new lessons. He reports that his team will spend as many as 10 hours developing a lesson that may only get taught in classrooms for six hours!
Arunan also enjoys mentoring students. One of his favorite classroom experiences happened during the kaleidoscope activity when kids began asking questions that were not just about a procedure or a protocol. One question in particular he remembers was, “What would happen if you looked through several kaleidoscopes in sequence?”
One day Arunan hopes to start his own company and feels that working with CRS is great for developing necessary skills. He says, “Volunteering with BASIS is a great way to work on communication and team-building.”
Currently Arunan is researching diagnostics for tuberculosis and oral cancer using CellScope, a mobile phone-based microscope, and spent the earlier part of his PhD working on understanding biological systems by developing tools to build a cell, piece-by-piece.
Arunan says, “Science facts are only as useful as the stories they tell and the questions they answer. Science is meaningful when it generates more questions, so hopefully our presentations will leave kids with more questions.”
We can’t wait to see what Arunan will do next!