July 12, 2001
MUSEUM RECEIVES GRANT FROM HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE 

The Cable Natural History Museum is among 29 science museums, nature centers, aquariums, zoos and other informal science education centers around the country that will receive grants totaling $12 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The awards support programs that strengthen science literacy and enhance science education. The Museum will receive a grant of $220,000 to continue its Forest Lab Intern Program (FLIP) from 2002-2005.

The FLIP program provides area high school students a paid, eight-week summer internship during which they practice hands-on science in the woods, on lakes and streams, and in the lab and classroom. Student interns have sampled Lake Superior water quality from the deck of the Lake Superior Research Institute’s vessel L.L. Smith, accompanied Wisconsin DNR wildlife biologists searching for elk and black bears, shadowed physicians on their daily rounds at the Marshfield Clinic, worked the controls at the Wild Oats Audio Services recording studio in Ashland, surveyed aquatic insects with scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency’s lab facilities in Duluth, and more.

The interns also plan and carry out Science in Action Week — a series of demonstrations, field trips, displays and brief interpretive programs provided for Museum visitors. In addition, interns design and lead field trips for their classmates back home.

The FLIP program started in 1998 with an initial grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In the past four years the program has provided paid science internships to nearly 40 students from among northwest Wisconsin high schools including Bayfield, Washburn, South Shore, Glidden, Solon Springs, Drummond, Hayward and Lac Courte Oreilles. Home-schooled students have also participated in the program.

The new grant will allow expansion of the FLIP program over the next four years. Future FLIP interns will develop four Science Saturdays workshops in which Museum visitors can work side-by-side with scientists and interns. Interns also will keep journals, interview scientists, and prepare radio scripts for broadcast on WOJB-FM, a 100,000-watt community radio station owned and operated by the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Tribe.

Many former FLIP interns have gone on to college, where they are pursuing degrees in psychology, biology, veterinary science, computer science and medicine. Others who have chosen non-science fields have also found value in their FLIP internship.

"FLIP was an experience that will stay with me always," said Jessica Meddock, a Washburn High School graduate now pursuing a career in dance theater. "It opened my eyes to a world of possibilities in the sciences, and shed some light where many high-school students are left in the dark."

The HHMI awards support science education programs that originate outside the traditional elementary or secondary school setting. The grants are intended to strengthen the science literacy of children and their families, and to stimulate an interest in careers in research and education.

A panel of scientists, educators and museum program specialists reviewed 235 applications for these grants. The Cable Natural History Museum joins a group of national award winners including the Bronx Zoo in New York, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the Science Museum of Minnesota; and the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Since 1992, HHMI has awarded 125 grants totaling $30.6 million to museums and other informal science education centers.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a medical research organization whose principal purpose is the conduct of biomedical research. It employs 350 Hughes investigators who conduct basic medical research in HHMI laboratories at 72 medical centers and universities nationwide.