Like many people pursuing a PhD in research, Drew Spacht entered his graduate work not looking forward to the teaching that would be expected of him. To his surprise, however, he loved it. “When I started, I was like, ‘I'm going to do pure science,’” he recalls. “And very quickly, I got wrapped up in teaching, putting a lot of my time into being in the classroom, and eventually found my way to mentoring a lot of TAs.”
Spacht’s PhD work would take him all the way to Antarctica to study its only known native insect, and then to a postdoc at the University of Haifa in Israel to study scorpions. During his postdoc, he started to feel like academic research was not the right fit for him. At the same time, a friend (Naava Schottenstein, featured in this ABE story) mentioned to him a new position at Columbus State Community College for ABE.
“I applied for this position, not knowing anything really about it. Then the more that I learned about it, the more I thought it all seemed too good to be true. But it was very much renewed, all of that passion that was there for science and teaching,” Spacht says. “ABE brought me back.”
As site coordinator and lab technician for ABE Central Ohio, a site now in its second full year, Spacht has one clear goal: making hands-on lab experiences accessible to anyone who wants to do them. This goal is rooted in a deep belief he has that all people are born scientists, and, he adds, artists as well. “Those things are not mutually exclusive because you need to have some sort of creative side in order to do science,” he says.
Spacht has brought his own creativity to ABE, thinking about new ways to connect biotechnology to students’ everyday lives while expanding the resources available to teachers in Central Ohio. He sees a lot of promise in what he calls “kitchen science”: using household supplies to do research. He is also excited about the exploration of new technologies like CRISPR in the classroom. “A lot of my teachers are extremely excited about those possibilities,” he says. “Hungry does not do justice to how they feel about being able to try the latest and greatest in biotech.”
Spacht and the team at ABE Central Ohio are also looking to expand the program to underserved groups, such as the American Sign Language (ASL) community. This spring, he will be working with a local ASL teacher in the classroom to learn how to help adapt the ABE labs for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, with the hopes of more broadly serving a large population of ASL students in the region. “I want to make these kinds of lab experiences that I never got to do in high school accessible to everyone,” Spacht says.
Growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, Spacht did not have much interest in biology initially. But he loved his chemistry classes and decided he wanted to be a chemist. While an undergraduate at Mercyhurst University in Erie, he found his way to biology, working with bugs. As he tells the story, Spacht never expected to want to study insects; it was a happenstance as he was running out of courses to take in college, and his undergraduate advisor recommended he take his class in insect biology.
“And 2 weeks into the class, I switched to biology,” he says. “I fell in love with it, and I switched from water ecology research to a lab focused on insect physiology.” He would eventually get his PhD in the molecular physiology of insects, looking at how they survive stressful, extreme events. That it took only 2 weeks in his advisor’s class to completely flip Spacht’s academic interests really speaks to the power of teaching, he says.
In his work now with ABE Central Ohio, Spacht sees everyday the enthusiasm generated by hands-on research. “I think it's something that we should step back and be very proud of ourselves for,” he says. “If ABE can bring somebody back to science who was ready to leave, and then get them really gung-ho and super enthusiastic about it, there's got to be something really great going on.”
Stay tuned for an upcoming story this summer on work at ABE Central Ohio to adapt ABE labs for ASL students.