Community connection

McKelvey School of Engineering has long had collaborations with area schools to pique students’ interest in pursuing engineering. However, one lab in McKelvey Engineering has established a partnership with an area high school that not only provides education to its students but gives McKelvey Engineering graduate students the opportunity to share their research in a new way and to integrate into the St. Louis community.

Since 2021, graduate students in McKelvey School of Engineering’s biomedical research labs have been working with students in Pattonville High School’s Project Lead the Way Biomedical Sciences Program, a four-year program in which Pattonville students learn about medicine, physiology, genetics, microbiology, public health and forensic science.

The program is designed to introduce Pattonville’s students to biorelated fields, which dovetails with Spencer Lake’s Musculoskeletal Soft Tissue Laboratory, in which Lake, associate professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, and his team study the biomechanics of orthopedic soft tissues to understand properties of healthy, injured and diseased tissues.

The partnership was the brainchild of Ryan Castile, lab manager in Lake’s lab, a 2009 graduate of Pattonville High School and a resident of the St. Louis County district. Although the program didn’t exist when Castile was at Pattonville, he learned of it through connections with the district, got the partnership off the ground and keeps it running into its fourth year.

St. Louis is a big community, but bringing them here and even running into them outside, it brings the WashU connection back to the front of their minds.

—Ryan Castile

“I have enjoyed giving back to the community that I came from and still live in,” Castile said. “I’m trying to plant the seed in the students that there are cool things going on 15 minutes away from where you are. Giving the students opportunities I didn’t have is a good thing.”

Each fall, seniors in the Pattonville program come to WashU to visit three biomedical labs and learn more about research and education opportunities in the McKelvey School of Engineering. Graduate students in Lake’s lab and others lead the students on the tours and demonstrate short experiments. In the spring, a larger group of graduate students from a variety of labs in McKelvey Engineering take hands-on, interactive demonstrations related to their ongoing research projects to Pattonville High School for a biomedical research showcase event designed for students in ninth-12th grades. The team wrote about the partnership in a paper published in the ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering last spring.

Rebecca Reals, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering in Lake’s lab, said she enjoys talking about her research and considers her participation in the program part of her work, not an extracurricular activity.

“It’s a different experience talking to high school students, and it really forces you to think about your research differently,” she said. “In some ways, it’s almost harder because we can’t use the words that we’re used to using every day. How do I take this complicated idea and distill it down to something that I can communicate to someone in high school in 10 minutes?”

For her demonstration, Reals, who studies joint contracture following elbow injury, worked with Castile to create a harness that limited movement of the elbow by using straps and rubber bands. The Pattonville students were asked to wear the harness while attempting to reach for a book on a high shelf or pick up a ball and quickly realized the impact of limited elbow movement.

“Because my work uses an animal model, I had to think deeply about how we could communicate the impact of elbow contracture to these students,” Reals said. “We could see the light bulb go off in their heads when they realized how hard it would be to do things with this restricted motion.” 

When we go to Pattonville, we see freshmen through seniors. We make a connection there and open their eyes a little bit more. Each year they will see more demos, then the seniors get to come to WashU and visit a few research labs.

—Spencer Lake

Shawn Pavey, also a doctoral student who studies orthopedic tissues in Lake’s lab, took cow and mouse tendons to the showcase.

“I wanted the students to see the difference in scale and how that affects things,” said Pavey, whose mother happens to be a Pattonville alumna. “There were students who told me that they had injured their Achilles tendon and were healing from that, and they liked knowing there were people trying to improve that healing process.”

Pavey said other students have asked for his advice about admission to WashU.

“They came back this year and said, ‘Thank you. I implemented your advice and got into WashU.’ That was really rewarding to see that impact,” Pavey said. 

Jamie Jobe, a science teacher at Pattonville, took over the Project Lead the Way program there in 2017 and teaches the courses for ninth, 11th and 12th grades. Many Pattonville students who have completed the program, which has about 120 students total, have gone into nursing school and pre-med programs. Now, three students are doing their senior research projects in the labs of Lake and Matt Bersi, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, in McKelvey Engineering.

“This whole experience feels effortless, even though we put a lot of work into it,” Jobe said. “Our seniors have taken a lot of field trips in their lives, but every time I take them on the campus tour, they say it’s the most valuable field trip they’ve been on.”

Although the Pattonville students learn a little about building prosthetics and 3D printing in their curriculum, the convergence of engineering with the biomedical field is often a new concept for them, Jobe said. 

“The first group of seniors that I took to WashU got to see how studying tendons in Spence’s lab was applicable to medicine and that there was more to medicine than being in front of patients,” she said. 

The unique aspect of the partnership is that it extends over multiple years and provides multiple opportunities for the two communities to interact. 

“When we go to Pattonville, we see freshmen through seniors,” Lake said. “We make a connection there and open their eyes a little bit more. Each year they will see more demos, then the seniors get to come to WashU and visit a few research labs. I like how we’re setting this up with continuity and repeat interactions so there are more relationships established than a one-time walk-through of some labs. And if we can get more of a pipeline established like we’re hoping to, we can host more students to complete their senior projects.”

Castile said both he and Lake have run into the Pattonville students in the community, which has helped to further the connection.

“St. Louis is a big community, but bringing them here and even running into them outside, it brings the WashU connection back to the front of their minds,” Castile said. 

See the Last Word for more insight from Rebecca Reals.