High School Students From Around the World Dive Into Science at the MBL

From Shanghai to Lynn, Mass., a few dozen cohorts of students arrived at the MBL eager to get their hands on horseshoe crabs and confocal microscopes.

For the eighth year, the MBL is hosting high school students from around the world to learn from a variety of scientists teaching courses in biology and ecology. Students from St. Anne's Belfield School from Charlottesville, Va. were the first group to arrive in December 2018, and more public schools have been able to take courses at the MBL in recent years with funding from the state of Massachusetts from September 2024. While faculty continue to prepare for groups to arrive from public and private schools across Massachusetts, as well as from places like Dallas and Providence, R.I., they welcomed some of the first groups of students for 2026 in late January, such as those from Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School and Lynn Classical High School. 

“I've got all this equipment that I've never seen before and I got to try them hands-on with a researcher who knows what to do and how to instruct us to use it,” said Eason Liu, a 10th grade student at Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School. “We did some fish dissections, and it's a bit terrifying at first, but I think I got used to it.”

After flying halfway across the globe, arriving just ahead of last weekend’s heavy snowstorm, students from Shanghai dove into nearly two weeks of immersive learning. They set up marine tanks for independent projects and used confocal microscopes to image organisms.

The two dozen students analyzed zebrafish and fruit fly samples, examining everything from embryo survival rates under different treatments to how individual cells change and organize across each stage of embryonic development.

This marks the third consecutive year that Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School has partnered with the MBL. For some first-time chaperones, such as biology teacher Zifan Luo, they have embraced the secondhand enthusiasm.

“As AP teachers, we can only show kids the diagrams from books that are already made by other scientists,” Luo said. “But coming here to see how these images are getting filmed and done is really a great experience. I can see their eyes sparkling with excitement every morning when they get here and care of their tanks, check their water quality. I would never imagine this could happen in a high school classroom.”

While students from Shanghai were wrapping up their final presentations, seniors from Lynn Classical High School geared up in white coats to run experiments and explore how viruses grow in different samples of bacteria. The almost week-long trip to the MBL was especially thrilling for Moroniqua Pierresin, a student at Lynn Classical High School. “This is the kind of thing I've envisioned myself doing in the future, so I was really excited to learn that this is exactly what I will be doing on this trip,” Pierresin said. “Especially with DNA. I was like, I'm all over it.”

Every year, Lynn Classical High School sends more students to the MBL to be inspired by science and new opportunities.

For David Winchester, a science teacher at the high school and native to Lynn, Mass., he couldn’t believe his ears at first when the MBL reached out five years ago to initiate the partnership and invite his students to get hands-on experience in the labs.

“When they come here, the students that we do cross paths with are often — and I'm not going to sugarcoat it — schools that are not in our demographic,” Winchester said. “[Our students] get to see possibilities that they may not see in Lynn.”