Outreach

June 21st-June 24th, 2022. NHMLA co-hosted a four-day K-12 Educator Workshop with California State University Dominguez Hills that explored how biodiversity has and is predicted to change. The workshop introduced teachers to local scientists and resources for scientific exploration and involved hands-on, multi-day immersion with visits to the Center for Innovation in STEM Education at CSUDH, the Museum, Cabrillo Aquarium, and AltaSea. The major products of the workshop were lesson plans or units designed by each teacher that made use of the resources to which they were introduced over the course of the week.

We’re using Notes from Nature to engage the community in transcribing label data from marine invertebrate specimens. You can help! Visit our project page for more.

The D.I.S.C.O (Diversity Initiative Southern California Ocean) project seeks to establish a molecular identification library with about 5,000 unknown marine species. The database, which would be created from the tissue samples of the collected species, aims to provide a significant contribution to the informative world about the vast marine ecosystem in the region.

This and the next few pieces reflect coverage of this museum specimen-based project by Spanish-language Univision, the leading news network in Los Angeles. 

The Los Angeles County National Museum of History (NMH) is leading an initiative called DISCO (Diversity Initiative Southern California Ocean), which allows high school students to venture into ocean exploration and learn about the seabed. and the species that inhabit it. “Our life is impacted by the ocean every day, so there is value in knowing how we are connected to it,” says Nicole Durán, representative of the NMH.

Although environmental damage affects everyone, Regina Wetzer, director of the National Museum of History in Los Angeles County, points out that it is women who generally make decisions in homes and in their close surroundings, which is why she highlighted the importance of a program that, together with AltaSea, brings together young women in ports to show you up close the need to protect the environment. “The more women are CEOs, the more changes and policies we are going to see,” said psychologist Lydiana García.

With the help of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (NHMLC), public school teachers spent four consecutive days learning about the ocean and experiencing natural science first-hand. All as part of the initiative called Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean (DISCO).

Each semester the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Agency, operating as a professional communication consultancy, supports the needs of local organizations. The agency is structured as a directed-research course and designed to give graduate and senior undergraduate students hands-on skills in communication and public relations strategies by serving community organizations and local nonprofits. This Fall semester five students with Communications/Digital Social Media, Public Relations & Advertising, and Communication Data Science backgrounds (and their faculty mentor) are developing social media templates and designs, branding, and a social media calendar for the DigIn project. We expect to roll out our first communications before the semester ends (December 2021). The goal is that the DigIn consortium can easily and efficiently continue our social media presence throughout the project without making it a burden on any single DigIn participant or institution.

This three part lecture series explores how scientists and researchers are working to integrate contextual information, link it to specimens, and make it available to all.  At each event our NHMLAC Research and Collections staff members, Dr. Regina Wetzer and Dean Pentcheff, discussed the extended specimen concept with a guest speaker.