Penn State students visited West Branch High School on Friday, April 10th, visiting multiple science classes, including anatomy, biology, physics, and several science electives. During the anatomy and biology classes, a woman who attends Penn State University for graduate school taught the class. She gave a presentation on microbiology and immunology. She told the students things that she learned about DNA, viruses, and bacteria during her studies. They played a Kahoot game to review what they learned.

Another woman came to Mrs. Emigh’s physics class. She was also doing her graduate studies at Penn State. She taught how DNA affects forensics. She told the students about the machines used and the techniques for examining DNA strands. She led an interactive activity with them in which they had suspects in a fake crime and had to find out who did it. She gave many details about DNA and how people use it for real crime scenes. 

This was a very informative day for West Branch Science classes. Physics teacher Mrs. Emigh says, “The DNA Day presentations in my class focused on the ties between DNA and forensics. They were extremely interesting and taught me new things! Did you know DNA has a negative charge? DNA analysis has been used to help exonerate wrongly convicted individuals, some of them were even on Death Row.” For more information, go to this website: https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/.

These students will continue their studies at Penn State. There was one more Penn State student at West Branch who was not mentioned. They visited a total of nine classes for the day. They were in the rooms of Mrs. Swisher, Mrs. Emigh, and Ms. Reed. DNA Day is celebrated on April 25th every year since 2003.