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.

The IB Biology students having completed their Individual Investigations, they are now proficient in a number of laboratory techniques, which they had to master in order to complete their projects. In a spirit of sharing, they have agreed to dedicate some of their precious time to demonstrate those newly acquired skills in front of the camera, in order to help subsequent generations of students.

In October of last year (2017) the Science Department was in panic! The water still for preparing distilled water had broken down irretrievably. In constant use since the original purchase in 2004 it chose the moment before the IB Biology Individual Investigations to stop working.

On Monday 19th of March, a group of 21 IB Biology students from Saint Maur International School, led by Ms Novick and Dr Erard visited the Yokohama Campus of RIKEN (Rikagaku Kenkyūsho, 理化学研究所), a multidisciplinary research organization that is engaged in a broad variety of research within natural sciences.

Several of our students were invited to take part in the Yokohama Science Frontier High School Science Immersion Camp that took place over three days. Please enjoy those reports from two of our students.

Saint Maur International School welcomed six students from Yokohama Science Frontier high School (YSFH) to take part in the practical phase of the IB Group 4 (Science/IT) project, held at the Saint Maur Science Centre on 20th October 2017. Grade 12 students formed inter-disciplinary Science groups and investigated a topic of their choice on the theme of ‘uncertainty’. Students designed the experimental protocol themselves, set up the apparatus, recorded data and wrote up a short report on their findings. International mindedness is a key component of all IB Group 4 subjects.