Announcement of Declan Cathcart as ABE MTF

We are excited to announce that one of the first Amgen Biotech Experience Master Teacher Fellows will be Irish teacher Declan Cathcart from Temple Carrig School in Greystones Co Wicklow.

ABE Master Teacher Fellowships were offered to 12 outstanding teachers from the three ABE global regions – Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. Fellows were chosen through a competitive process and teachers had to demonstrate tangible contributions to student learning and the ABE program, effective leadership skills, strong communication skills and a specific interest in at least one bioscience topic that would deepen and extend ABE. Declan has been a valued ABE Ireland teacher since 2015 and has contributed enthusiastically to the programme here.

Declan and the Master Teacher Fellows will spend the next six months working alongside each other, with global ABE staff and with expert mentors to explore issues in biotechnology and produce new teaching material for the ABE programme. Declan told us,

“I am looking forward to getting stuck into things over the coming months. I am hoping to focus on developing comprehensive resources for teachers based on food biotech, fermentations, and algal biotech activities that I do with my students. I am very keen to get the gfp/rfp transformation working in student's hands and streamlined to make it as universally applicable in school labs as possible. I am also looking at designing and piloting some new ideas for activities around PCR-based rapid diagnostics and using bioinformatics. I am also interested in looking at student activities around genomics in personalised medicine, and RNA vaccine development. I am very much looking forward to working with everyone in the months ahead.”

This is the first year the Amgen Biotech Experience has named Master Teacher Fellows. We are very proud that Declan Cathcart is one of them.