During the summer vacation, Yokohama Science Frontier High School (YSFH) kindly invited a Grade 12 student to experience life as a Japanese high school student.  This was just one of the many events organized as part of the Saint Maur – YSFH collaboration. In the following article, the student reflects on this worthwhile experience.

The yearly visit of the Yokohama campus of the RIKEN Research Institute has now become somewhat of a tradition and it is truly one of the highlights for IB Biologists. This year, we brought this collaboration one step further with the visit of one of RIKEN Yokohama's senior scientists, Dr Todd Duane Taylor, who gave our IB Biologists and Physicists a lecture about handling and curating the ever increasing amount of scientific data generated worldwide.

Saint Maur International School's yearly visit to the RIKEN Yokohama Campus took place on Monday, February 25th. This is one of several opportunities for our IB Biologists to connect with the world of research and academia, and to discover the making of cutting edge science.

Over the past few years, the Science Department has been producing a number of videos presenting some of the various experimental techniques routinely used in its labs. The initiative was started by a group of IB students who wished to share their experience and newly acquired skills with fellow scientists.

Six students from Yokohama Science Frontier High School (YSFH) visited Saint Maur between November 14th – 16th as part of the annual exchange programme. The students followed their Grade 10 and 11 hosts and as well as taking a keen interest in how Science is taught at Saint Maur, participated in the full range of regular classes and activities. The event provided students with the opportunity to find out about the differences between the Japanese education system and life at an International School. Many of the students were surprised by the differences between them.

The Science Department recently welcomed back one the the Saint Maur graduate from the 1995 class. Dr Vanessa Sancho-Shimizu kindly took on some of her time off visiting relatives in Japan to give a presentation to our Grade 11 Biology students about her work on the study of genetics in order to understand Human health and disease.

Continuing on our effort to bring real world science to the classroom, we received our first guest of the year, Dr Shirley Tamura (MPH, RD, DrPH), a nutritonist who was involved in research for a number of years at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley's Schools of Public Health.

Thanks to an ongoing effort to communicate about its many activities, the Science Department has been generating more and more interest from fellow scientists in Japan and abroad. We were recently contacted by Dr Tucker Gilman, a biologist at the University of Manchester, who kindly offered us to present his work to our students. Dr Gilman and one of his graduate students, Ms Rebecca Lewis, came to our school on Friday 18th of May and gave our Grade 11 IB Biologists a 1-hour presentation of their work through a lecture and an exciting activity.