National Science Foundation-Funded Research Experience for Teachers
(NSF RET)

This Institute administers the NSF RET which is a supplementary program to IBB's NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). This program is sponsored by generous support from the NSF Engineering Research Center for BioRenewable Chemicals (CBiRC). The program dates for summer 2013 are 6/3/13 - 8/2/13.  Applicant MUST be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and MUST currently be a high school teacher. Notification of acceptance to this program will be done via email no earlier than four weeks after the application deadline. The online application can be found here, and the deadline for all application materials is April 12, 2013. More details regarding the program can be found on the 2012 NSF RET Flyer. 

With initial funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, IBB has created a prototypical Biotechnology Summer Academy for students from three predominantly Hispanic high schools (Science Academy of South Texas; Milby Science Institute in Houston, and YES College Preparatory School in Houston). Students are brought to the Rice campus for a two-week program including communications workshops, presentations about possible majors and career options, and field trips. These visiting student will be paired with one of our REU interns as their 'mentor.'

This internship is an eight-week program involving participation in ongoing research work in a science laboratory at Rice University and also assistance with IBB's High School Summer Academy. After this internship, the high school teacher is expected to be able to develop new science curricula that may be implemented in their high school courses and keep IBB informed of their progress towards this end. The eight-week stipend is $6,000 per teacher.

An example of how the program works, can be found by viewing the NSF RET 2012 Summer Schedule.

The 2012 IBB RET intern was Jennifer Acero, a Biology and Anatomy & Physiology Teacher at Langham Creek High School - a school that is part of the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD in Houston, TX.  As part of her RET experience, Ms. Acero performed her summer research work in the laboratory of Dr. Ramon Gonzalez, where she elucidated the roles of differentially expressed proteins under octanoic acid stress.  In addition, Ms. Acero also assisted with the IBB Summer Academy and IBB Summer BioScience Program for visiting high school students.

RET 2008-2011 Activity Gallery