BioCity graduate Muktadir Chowdhury, with memento statuette and book, both fabricated by NHPS students in the manufacturing “pathway” program. Graduates with, beginning on left, Board of Ed member and former principal Abi Benitez, Carter Winstanley, and Supt. Madeline Negrón. For an insp iring hour or so Thursday afternoon, Elm City became BioCity as the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) graduated Diamond Shaw, bound for the University of Connecticut, Sarina Najarian-Garb, on her way to Wesleyan, Muktadir Chowdhury, heading to Yale University, and ten other future scientists — the entire cohort college-bound in the fall. They comprise the first cohort of 13 pioneering public high school students to have completed — and they helped to shape — the BioCity Academy within the city’s public school district. BioCity, also called the BioCity Academy, is one of the half-dozen “pathway” programs within NHPS, which prepare students for college and meaningful careers by immersing them in advanced college-credit coursework, experiential learning, and, in the case of BioCity, high-level lab work shoulder to shoulder with top research scientists. The graduates spoke with gratitude and affection about how the pathways approach — with its dynamic teachers and tutors and especially learning in small groups — provided what already seems to them as valuable life lessons as important as the career-opening access that has come with exposure to top flight labs and scientists. For example, a sense of teamwork, and a belief in themselves as future contributors to science, industry, and humanity, which many did not have when they began their journey as high school juniors in 2024. “It’s not only rigorous courses, but part of the design is bringing 15 kids from five different high schools to work together because that’s how you work in science,” said Bob McCain, one of the creators of the program and the supervisor of sciences for the NHPS. Filling up with about 100 family members and admirers, the inspiring graduation scene unfolded in the spacious conference room at 101 College St. That’s long-time New Haven developer Carter Winstanley’s bioscience and tech hub, currently the home of Alexion among other pharmaceutical research firms, that has helped put New Haven on the map as a bioscience-innovating city. The 101 College St. building is where the students have, for the last two years, been bused daily around 12;30 p.m. from high schools across town.  They ascend to the second floor where they have their own dedicated classroom overlooking the city, and where, for the next three to four hours, they learn pre-calculus, advanced calculus, chemistry, and other high level courses (for which they receive college credit) taught by inspiring, often young. NHPS teachers; they receive help if they need it, along with the skinny on what college admissions and college life are really all about, from Yale College tutors only a few years older than the BioCity kids. Then, around 2:00 p.m. until the end of the day, they enter their own dedicated lab, also on the second floor of 101 College. There they learn how to dissect a shark (carefully!), a pig’s heart, another half-dozen animal organs; and then they hit the centrifuges, spectrometers, DNA sequencers, $2,000 microscopes with attached cameras, and other equipment similar to what outfits other professional bioscience labs at 101 College St. and at top hubs around the world. “We’re surrounded by equipment that costs more than our future cars!” quipped Diamond Shaw, who along with Sarina Najarian-Garb, were the eloquent — and funny — BioCity class valedictorians. “It was academically rigorous,” Najarian-Garb said, reviewing her two years of study, “but it was not competitive,” as she described the confidence and spirit-building atmosphere of the teaching she was exposed to. “When you huddle together to solve a problem, you learn it’s not the right answers but how you get at them that’s important. We chose to get to the top together.” NHPS Supt. Madeline Negrón and Mayor Justin Elicker, among other speakers at the ceremonies, termed the occasion and the kids’ achievements historic. “You are trailblazers,” Negrón declared. “You have helped us form a new vision of what bioscience education can be.” So much of the “pathways” approach, Negrón added, is about working with the city’s science and business partners, like Winstanley, to create the physical opportunities that open up access for NHPS kids to professional work-related experiential learning that will change the students’ lives and in the not-so-long run materially benefit the city. Student after student told this reporter that BioCity helped them not only raise personal career horizons but also learn in new ways. As Najarian put it, “We learned resilience, we learned to break down a huge problem to its parts, and that a failed experiment is not something horrible, but an important data point.” Yale-bound Muktadir Chowdhury said he has “always been into tech,” that he had built computers on his own, for example, and yet in all his regular high school classes he’d sat in a chair and the teacher would explain stuff. Not so with the BioCity experiences. “We work as a team,” he said, “sharing notes, progressing together.” Career-wise he had been leaning toward tech. Yet over BioCity’s two years’ working with his fellow students for the first time as colleagues, Chowdhury said he’s now leaning toward a more people-centered science career in medicine. He hopes to study, to that end, neuroscience when he arrives at Yale. A lot of science is about failure and dealing with it, about not necessarily getting where you want to be right away, and yet still carrying on, and Diamond Shaw, like her colleagues, said the resilience to deal with that — in science and in life — will be  a big takeaway from her BioCity experiences. “Joey [the kids’ dynamic calculus teacher Joey Lombardi] never looked down on us if we got a bad grade,” Shaw recalled. “He always made us laugh, he was always upbeat and positive. A disappointed teacher can make you want to stop learning. Not here. He was okay with failure. Tomorrow’s always another day,” he’d say. Indeed. “In the eighth grade we begin to do a lot of career awareness,” said Negrón, and then the pathways options begin to be available to kids across the high schools. Any student can apply — equal access is a key component — if they’re interested in experiential learning, internships, traveling, for example, to manufacturing floors around town and learning to operate state-of-the-art machinery in the manufacturing pathway. There are dozens of kids in that program, including a cohort of some 30 recent graduates, who all were offered jobs at Electric Boat in New London, Negrón reported. Other pathways include business, healthcare, and education, and NHPS planners are developing one in the culinary arts to be launched soon. While the BioCity “pathway” is unique in that it involves high-level, side-by-side research alongside scientists, each “pathway” requires partner businesses, local colleges to provide tutors, and, importantly, dedicated funding. At least seven years in the planning, the BioCity pathway got a huge boost from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding and other grants that enabled NHPS to outfit the 101 College St. lab for the kids with the $400,000 to $500,000 of equipment, said McCain, the school system’s supervisor of science education. “We’ve all been dreaming about this moment,” said Negrón in her charge to the graduates. “You are proof of our mission, the result of a powerful ecosystem involving the colleges, the mayor, Carter Winstanley, industry participation. You are extraordinary, you’ve set a high bar, you’re trailblazers.” But will the chronically cash-strapped Board of Ed continue to find the money to keep these critical pathways open in the years ahead? “How we continue,” said Negrón, “that’s top of mind. Top of mind.” The post Hail To The First Graduates Of BioCity appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less