Dr. Jeremy Babendure is the Executive Director of the SciTech Institute leading signature programs including the annual Arizona SciTech Festival and the Chief Science Officers. The festival involved 800+ collaborators, 50+ signature events and draws 500,000+ attendees. The Chief Science Officers Initiative, transforming student voice in the conversation about STEM and education now includes 880 students in 10 US states and 4 countries. Finally, Babendure is the state lead for the Arizona STEM Ecosystem including Arizona’s STEM stakeholders in an international community of practice of 80+ STEM Ecosystems.
Dr. Jeremy Babendure is the Executive Director of the SciTech Institute, the Annual Arizona SciTech Festival, Associate Professor of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University and a research fellow at the Institute for Learning Innovation. The annual AZ SciTech festival includes over 800 collaborators, 2000 events and draws over 500,000 participants. Most recently Jeremy launched the Chief Science Officers Initiative, transforming student voice in the conversation about STEM and education in Arizona, Oregon, Michigan, Georgia, Mexico, Kuwait and soon to be Florida and New York. In addition, through his work with the national STEM Ecosystems project he helped launch a local Arizona STEM School Community of Practice bringing together 40+ diverse schools teams focused on STEM.
Prior to his work in Arizona, Jeremy received his doctorate in in the lab of the late Nobel Laureate, Dr. Roger Tsien at the University of California, San Diego developing molecular sensors for the detection of RNA. Following this work, he and Roger launched the ScienceBridge program as mechanism to bring current science to the San Diego schools annually impacting ~200 teachers, ~20,000 students, and ~60,000 community members and attaining 12M+ in national grants.
Bio: Babendure’s passion is to enhance community awareness and engagement in STEM through the establishment of broad reaching STEM initiatives that draw in diverse partnerships from education, community government and business. Through combined efforts of the Arizona SciTech Festival, Arizona STEM School Community of Practice and the Chief Science Officers Imitative, Babendure has helped to engage 800+ organizations from 30+ communities to engage 400K+ people annually. Prior to his work in Arizona, Jeremy received his doctorate in in the lab of the late Nobel Laureate, Dr. Roger Tsien at UCSD developing molecular sensors. Roger and Babendure collaboratively launched the ScienceBridge program to bring the excitement of the Tsien lab to San Diego schools impacting ~200 teachers, ~20K students, and ~60,000 community members annually.
My passion is to enhance community awareness and engagement in STEM through the establishment of broad reaching STEM initiatives that draw in diverse partnerships from education, community government and business. Through combined efforts of the Arizona SciTech Festival, Arizona STEM School Community of Practice and the Chief Science Officers Imitative, I have helped to engage 800+ organizations from 30+ communities to engage 400K+ people annually. Prior to my work in Arizona, I collaboratively launched the ScienceBridge with the late Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien to bring the excitement of the Tsien lab to San Diego schools impacting ~200 teachers, ~20K students, and ~60,000 community members annually.