Traditional high school summer research programs are often inaccessible to underserved students. Many established programs exacerbate the gap in educational equity by adding a price tag or rigorous requirements, but R2R bridges this gap in Philadelphia by providing early exposure to biotechnology and research through hands-on lab experiences and eye-opening mentorship.
R2R is a student organization at Penn that hosts weekly lab workshops at Penn for a cohort of 20 students, with future goals to expand. With a heavy emphasis on hands-on learning and mentorship, the curriculum highlights basic lab skills, practical research tools needed in academia, features career mixers, and an end-of-year research symposium. In our pilot year, we reached 450+ students!