Five+ years ago, a small team of biology educators noticed a gap. CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing had become central to modern biology. Undergraduate classrooms hadn’t caught up. Curricula, faculty training, lab budgets – all lagging behind the science.
So they built a network to close it.
The CRISPR in the Classroom Network (CiTC) is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) led by Donna Pattison at the University of Houston.
The model: multi-day, hands-on summer workshops. A new host campus every year. A steering committee of past participants training the next cohort.
Here’s where it went:
📍 2022 — Virtual (launched mid-pandemic)
📍 2023 — University of Houston, TX
📍 2024 — Pomona College, CA
📍 2025 — Randolph-Macon College, VA
📍 2026 — Rollins College, FL (culminating convening)
The model kept evolving. Year 1 was virtual out of necessity. By Year 2, in-person hands-on labs. By Year 4, real pre/post data: participants’ confidence in specialized techniques like in vitro nuclease assays jumped from 2.14 to 4.32 on a 5-point scale after four days of training. That’s not a marginal bump-that’s someone going from “I’ve never done this” to “I can teach this.”
Five years later, the numbers:
→ 75+ educators trained in hands-on CRISPR instruction
→ Consistent reach into community colleges and under-resourced institutions, year after year
→ 92% rated their workshop highly valuable
→ 73% had implemented CRISPR content in their own classrooms w/in a year of training
→ 100,000+ reads of the network’s open-access textbook (https://lnkd.in/eNQAiGeS)
→ 100% of convening attendees said they want to stay involved in some capacity
The ripple effects go beyond the workshops themselves. Among core network leadership surveyed at the closing convening: 8 co-authored a publication or presentations tied to their involvement. 5 adopted new teaching materials. 4 landed a new grant. 4 built a new institutional partnership.
The closing convening also featured a keynote from Stanford’s Stanley Qi on CRISPRkit — a $2, cell-free CRISPR experiment kit already reaching thousands of students, with a goal of 200,000 by 2028. A nice full-circle moment for a network built on the same idea: make hands-on gene editing education actually accessible.
That access theme kept surfacing. The grant ends in December. The community hasn’t.
When participants were asked what this network should be remembered for, one answer kept coming back in different words: access. Access to equipment, to expertise, to a room full of people who’d tried the same experiment and were happy to troubleshoot it with you.
Proud to have helped tell this story.
