Core Leader: Diana Murray

The Outreach Core will provide dissemination of CaST technologies to the research community via hands-on case study experiences and targeted activities for essentially all ability levels, from no-tech through high-tech. To promote the use of Systems Biology approaches and to support the implementation and expansion of the research products developed by CaST Investigators, CaST Outreach will build on existing partnerships and foster new ones to help train cancer biologists and clinicians as well as young investigators. The Outreach Core will develop hands-on case studies and activities and provide direct dissemination of CaST technologies to the research community, thus maximizing the impact of CaST research. Educational efforts will focus on recruiting and training young scientists. Our goals include:

• Web-based CaST resources. CaST data and resources will be combined with CaST Investigator publications to create a set of tutorials and workflows as part of containerized packages for a different CaST publication each year. To facilitate dissemination and adoption, parallel sets of tutorials targeted to researchers from CSBC centers, cancer researchers, more generally, and clinicians will be provided. The resources will be broadly accessible through repositories and the CSBC Cancer Complexity Knowledge Portal.
• CaST for high school students. Building on the success and popularity of the DREAM-High program, an expanded program will be created for high-school students recruited through CaST’s long-term partnership local high schools to leverage materials from the web-based CaST resources. A core subset of activities will be developed and offered with investigators from other CSBC centers.
• Mentoring for CaST Junior Investigators. CaST postdoctoral research scientists will work with the Core director to implement the outreach objectives. By contributing to the sustainability and offering of CaST resources to scientists and clinicians, the postdocs will gain experience with scientific collaboration and the implementation of systems biology perspectives in other fields.

Tutorials developed by the Outreach Core will be available through our GitHub site.