Congratulations to the all the participating middle school students!

The final event of the 2007 Middle School Bioscience Challenge took place yesterday and was a great success.

The projects were exceptional, the presentations interesting and the judging difficult. Students had the opportunity to listen to the other student presentations before breaking into groups to engage in hands on workshops. Omaha North instructor LeeAnn Vaughan and her students took participants through the fascinating process of extracting DNA from various fruit while Dr. Don Lee from UNL led the groups through a plant based experiment.

Thanks go to LeeAnn Vaughan and her students along with Don Lee for their assistance in facilitating the student workshops, to Amy Geschwender from Li-Cor and Mark Botner from Omaha North for acting as a judges and to Susie McGuire, our guest speaker.

Final results are as follows:

We would like to thank all of the participating students, teachers, mentors and schools for helping us to make this an outstanding event. It's been an exciting year for bioscience in Nebraska and we hope this challenge has opened up a new world for everyone involved. We would also like to thank BIO and Merck for providing the funding that made the whole contest possible.

For more information about the project, please contact Randy Vlasin at (402)471-3104 or randy@futureforcenebraska.org