August 2026
Back to School
We’re getting ready for another exciting year of our Life as a Scientist program, and this year we’re growing! Rise Up will now be working in three Cleveland high schools: Garrett Morgan, Lincoln-West at its new location, and our newest partner school, John Hay. Our weekly visits to the schools will happen on Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays where we will have roughly 350 students engaged in the process of real-world scientific research.
The school year brings a lot of change for students and teachers, including newly merged schools, new classmates, and new locations. We’ll begin visiting classrooms in September, once everyone has had a little time to settle in. During our fall sessions, students will learn about the program, brainstorm their own experimental ideas, and work with professional scientists to write grant proposals to Rise Up. After our NIH modeled study section, the selected projects will receive funding, allowing students to bring their ideas to life and conduct their own original research throughout the school year. We can’t wait to meet these new students, reconnect with returning teachers, and see what creative questions this year’s young scientists decide to explore!
We have more big news: the 2026 Journal of Young Scientists is now available to read online for free! The journal features original research conducted and written by students during last year’s program. We’re incredibly proud of everything they accomplished and excited to share their work with the community. We will be sharing images of the students receiving their copy in next months newsletter. Visit our website to read the journal and help us celebrate Cleveland’s newest published scientists!
2026 JoYS
SEM Awards
Tri-C SEM Awards
This month we joined students, teachers, and community partners from across Northeast Ohio for the Tri-C Youth Technology Academy’s first Scanning Electron Microscope Photo Competition and Award Ceremony. The virtual event celebrated an incredible first year of schools and community organizations using the SEM and it gave everyone a chance to see some of the amazing images students captured along the way.
Students from participating schools submitted their favorite images in categories ranging from best close-up and most interesting patterns to most artistic image. The entries were reviewed by an impressive panel of judges representing the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Case Western Reserve University, Hitachi High-Tech America, and the Youth Technology Academy.
We were so proud to see Rise Up students take home nearly half of the available awards, including the prize for Best in Show! It was exciting to watch their names and images appear throughout the ceremony and see their creativity and hard work recognized alongside students from across the region. They spent weeks learning how to prepare samples, operate the microscope, and explore objects that most of us have never seen at that level of detail and they created some truly incredible images in the process.
A huge thank-you to the Youth Technology Academy and Will Canaday for putting together such a fun celebration and, more importantly, for helping us bring this remarkable technology directly into our partner schools. It is not every day that high school students get to use a scanning electron microscope in their own classroom, and our students made the most of the opportunity.
We’re thrilled that YTA has been selected to host the loaner SEM for another year. We look forward to continuing this partnership and finding even more ways for Rise Up students to utilize this opportunity during the coming school year!
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