In the ATE Survey 2025 researchers at The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University report that 50 percent of 294 Advanced Technological Education (ATE) initiatives provided at least one type of student service or support in 2024.

The most frequent ATE student-focused activities were support obtaining certifications or licenses; mentoring; business and entrepreneurial skills development; support for transitioning into college; and student competitions.¹

The ATE Survey 2025 authors, who are all affiliated with EvaluATE—the Evaluation Hub of the Advanced Technological Education Program, also cited other researchers’ work and noted, “Studies have shown that students who experience these types of enrichment and support programs are more likely to have positive attitudes toward science and sustain interest in STEM.”²

At the 2025 ATE Principal Investigators’ Conference 44 students and recent alumni of ATE programs summarized their learning experiences on posters and provided details in conversations with conference attendees during the student poster session on October 29.

Two biotechnology students exemplify how students’ fresh perspectives lead to new, interesting findings with potential to benefit others.

Kasielynn Bussard, who completed an associate degree in biotechnology with a certificate in nanotechnology at Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) this month, translated her interest in microscopy into a fundraiser for new instruments and engaging lab exercises.

Mia Ben-Ami, a biochemistry major at Los Angeles Pierce College, created a 3D prototype for holding round Petri dishes so pipetting bacteria samples for antibiotic testing could be done more efficiently with a robot.   

Bussard Turned Microscopy Images into Art  

At Salt Lake Community College Bussard purposefully pursued outside learning opportunities. She participated in the Micro Nano Technology Collaborative Undergraduate Research Network (MNT-CURN) an ATE project of the Micro Nano Technology Education Center (MNT-EC) at Pasadena City College. It placed 132 students into summer research programs with 41 industry and university partners.

Kasielynn Bussard translated her interest in microscopy into art to raise funds to support her college’s biotech program and to develop engaging lab exercises.

During 2024-25 and this fall Bussard served as a mentor to other students in MNT-EC’s current internship program, the Advanced Technology Technician Training (AT3) Program. It equips 300 high school and community college students annually with hands-on learning and cutting-edge technical experiences in collaboration with the center’s partners.

As a member of Salt Lake Community College's Nanotechnology Club Bussard did hands-on research that club members presented at the American Chemical Society’s national conference. The students also became involved in efforts to preserve funding for their programs.

“I realized that if we started using our microscopy program and instruments to do an art show, that not only does that help us with our fundraiser issue, but through this project you're not just trying to get an image, you're trying to get an image that looks good, which means you have to deal with charge up, you have to do framing better.

“You have to actually know what you're doing with the microscope to get high quality images. So through one project and a side project, you can actually create a more cohesive learning experience,” she explained during the poster session.

University Workshop Experiences Led to Suggestions for New Lab Exercises

Bussard also did two one-week nanomedicine workshops at the University of North Texas, a two-week photolithography workshop at the University of New Mexico, and two semester-long cleanroom programs as the University of Utah.

“At these university workshops I started to realize the benefits of unexpected outcomes during learning projects and opportunities. And when I went back to the microscopy lab [at Salt Lake Community College] and started working with vanadinite [a mineral] I realized an opportunity for a potential lab that we could do to teach about backscattered electron modes during scanning electron microscopy.

“Because vanadinite, when it's polished with mineral oil, just looks like a shiny orange rock. But if you put it in the microscope in this mode, lighter elements are darker and heavier elements are lighter. So what you get with the hydrocarbon mineral oil on a lead rock is a blotchy, oily looking rock.

“That's not exactly what you would expect. So that opens up the potential for having a lab that is more engaging than some other typical backscattered electron mode workshops,” she explained while standing in front of her poster displaying photographs taken with a scanning electron microscope of vandinite, butterfly wings, and a steel slug.

Bussard combined her observations about vanadinite with what she learned in education and communications courses at Snow College, where she began her postsecondary education as an education and communications major. This led to her asking, “How do we make labs that connect academic learning and actual manufacturing processes? Because you can't necessarily have people that are strong in both. But, if you create projects that interlink and support it, then that all that improves learning outcomes overall—so that's kind of what I've learned from all this.”

Ben-Ami’s Ideas Save Time in Lab

Mia Ben-Ami created a 3D prototype for holding round Petri dishes that would then fit into a robot that does pipetting for lab tests.  

At LA Piece College Ben-Ami participates in Tiny Earth, an international initiative that involves college students in gathering and testing soil samples to help find new antibiotics. While following the project’s protocol, Ben-Ami came up with a better way do the pitch-and-patch process of separating bacteria samples for testing.

“I automated a specific part of this process, and it's a very tedious part of this process because the second you think you found antibiotics, you then need to test bacteria against those antibiotics.

“And so what I did is I basically transitioned from a circular Petri dish. And this is a 3D model that I printed that fits into our robot. And what I did is I transitioned to square Petri dishes....When you pick-and-patch this process, you usually go from a circular one and you usually draw grids, like you see here on the square one. They [students] have to manually hand draw it because circular Petri dishes do not come with that drawn off. So they have to spend the time to draw straight lines...and then they have to patch this specific bacteria into each grid space. So I took away this whole unnecessary time-consuming process and I said, let's implement this into a square Petri dish that already comes with a grid...

 “Now once I have it on a square one, how do I get bacteria from my master plate, which is the place you start off with that has no antibiotics on it, to the plate with my antibiotics, that's what the robot is doing. Instead of me having to sit there manually scrape off some bacteria and patch it.”

Ben-Ami concluded her explanation by saying, “It saves you human time because you can now step away from this part of the process and utilize your other soil samples for something else.”

The Opentrons OT-2 robot, which she created the 3D Petri dish holder to work with, is relatively inexpensive. She said it does a consistent job of picking up bacteria samples and transferring them in concise dots on plates with media for growing.

“So typically people spend around 20 minutes picking and patching [manually with hand-held pippettes]. I just need to set it up for the robot. Takes around five minutes, you're [saving] around 15 minutes time and it can stay in the robot afterwards. So if you're still doing some other part of your experiment, you can leave it there and then put it in the container when you're ready to deal with it,” she said.

Ben-Ami is also president of the Symbiotix Bioscience Club, which is open to all STEM students at LA Pierce College. “Whoever has a passion for science, we like to cater to,” she said. Three other members of the club also attended the ATE PI conference and participated in the poster session.

The four are students of Aron Kamajaya, the principal investigator of two ATE projects: Training the Skilled Biomanufacturing Workforce through Innovative Internships in Protein Biomanufacturing, which is also known as ASPIRE for Advanced Student-centered Projects: Internship, Research, and Education, and IGD-LA, Raising Biotech Leaders in High Schools through Innovative Mentoring and Industry Partnerships.    

1. McClure, L., Sturgis, E., Al Mahi, S., Au, E., Green, M., Becho, L., Wingate, L. A., & Gullickson, A. (2025). ATE survey 2025: Findings from the annual survey of principal investigators in the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education program. The Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University. https://atesurvey.evalu‐ate.org
2. David M. Merolla and Richard T. Serpe. “STEM enrichment programs and graduate school matriculation: The role of science identity salience”. In: Social Psychology of Education 16.4 (2014), pp. 575–597.