Kayla Davis (BBS)
To Serve Better — Science of success
As the crow flies, it’s 1,450 miles from Kayla Davis’ hometown of Stillwater, Okla., to Boston, where she has spent the past five years as a Ph.D. student in biological and biomedical sciences at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Yet in some ways she has never felt closer to home.
Three years ago Davis co-founded the Oklahoma Science Project (OSP), an online resource with the goal of improving access to and promoting science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in her home state. She felt compelled to action by reports of the fallout from steep cuts to state education funding in recent years due to fiscal shortfalls.
Davis, whose passion for science policy and for helping her fellow students began in high school, was most troubled that there were no funds specifically allocated for STEM education in 2016, and that 20 percent of school districts operate on four-day school weeks.
“It was soul-crushing to us as people who are interested in science education and pedagogy,” recalls Davis of the first time she and co-founder Forrest Rogers, also a Stillwater native, heard this statistic. “So we came up with a resource for students who are interested in science to get something out of that fifth day of school when they’re sitting at home.”
Davis and Rogers, a Ph.D. candidate in biological psychology at the University of California, Davis, created a free set of real-world science lessons that introduce learners to the Python coding language and range in topics from biology to statistics, and physics to image analysis.