Innovative program training educators across the nation to engage students in the hunt to find new treatments to fight infectious diseases.

Old Greenwich, CT – Scientific discovery can only happen in the laboratory...right? Wrong! It can happen at-home, in your own backyard. As more universities and high schools are switching to online fall semesters due to the impacts of COVID-19, laboratory courses are digging for ways to incorporate white-coat learning at home. That’s where the Small World Initiative® (SWI) comes in. SWI is preparing our future workforce by engaging them in solving the most pressing global health challenges of our time.

This summer, SWI is spearheading an online instructor training workshop July 27th-31st to demonstrate how groundbreaking research can be translated to at-home learning. Through virtual instruction, thirty-three undergraduate and high school educators from across the nation will get the tools they need to engage their students in the hunt to find new treatments to fight infectious diseases known as superbugs by analyzing soil samples from their own backyards.

While most of these treatments come from soil and it remains a great place to look for new ones, finding new candidates requires screening thousands of samples. SWI’s approach provides the requisite platform to crowdsource discovery by tapping into the power of thousands of student researchers concurrently addressing a global challenge. Through a series of experiments, students will collect soil samples, isolate diverse bacteria, test their bacteria against clinically-relevant microorganisms, and characterize those showing inhibitory activity.

“Infectious disease threats, like the coronavirus and superbugs, undermine modern medicine as they do not need passports to travel the world,” says SWI President, Erika L. Kurt. While COVID-19 has already taken nearly 600,000 lives, superbugs kill more than 700,000 each year and complicate COVID-19 cases. Kurt firmly believes that “leveraging the collective efforts of thousands of students and educators around the world gives us a real chance to tackle these challenges head on and provides an incredible STEM education in the process.” As COVID-19 has demonstrated, a lack of preparedness can take a huge human, financial, and educational toll, making the work Kurt is doing critical to our fight against the next pandemic.

Since its inception at Yale University in 2012, SWI has impacted hundreds of schools across the United States and around the world and helps them transform science education and promote antibiotic discovery through the curiosity and inventiveness of young scientists. “SWI allows students to not just dream about using science to save lives, but to actually dig in and help save the world, starting at school,” says Kurt. “The program is an example of how groundbreaking research can start in the classroom and even in your own backyard. A clump of soil might hold the answer to stopping the next pandemic.”

ABOUT THE SMALL WORLD INITIATIVE®
The Small World Initiative (SWI) is an innovative nonprofit dedicated to transforming STEM education while solving pressing real-world health challenges. Each year, SWI trains educators to replace traditional courses with discovery-based courses. Initiated at Yale University in 2012, SWI's primary program engages students in the hunt to find new antibiotics to tackle the growing global health challenge of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, commonly known as “superbugs.” To date, SWI has trained educators at more than 300 schools in 45 states and 15 countries. More information is available at www.smallworldinitiative.org.

Press Inquiries – Members of the media are invited to contact us at info@smallworldinitiative.org.