The CARLOW Center for Medical Innovation is a unique and one-of-a-kind space for students interested in all aspects of health care. We offer a variety of different focuses, from hands-on patient care to 3D modeling, printing, and fitting of prosthetics. As the Director of the CARLOW Center for Medical Innovation, my goal was to prepare interested students for future careers in health care while making them competitive university applicants. Our curriculum involves a variety of learning modes: lectures, hands-on skills labs, and virtual reality scenario labs. We are also fortunate enough to have the opportunity to have our own research laboratory for our tissue culture work. Having this space allows our high school students to work with skin-derived stem cells and cancer cells, an opportunity that most aren’t exposed to until they are well into college.

In our first year of operation, we expanded and developed our program quickly, causing space to be a problem. We needed a bigger boat! To help address our space issue, the CARLOW Center expanded this summer and added a beautiful glass wing. A new tissue culture hood was purchased as part of our expansion, allowing for more students to be able to do tissue culture work. We also purchased a few new resin and filament 3D printers for our bioengineering students to get started on modeling prosthetic devices for donation to Shriners Children’s Hospital and military veterans.Our plan for this coming school year is to enroll more students in our program, bring new PCC health science courses to our students, and increase the number of our student entries into the LA County Science and Engineering Fair.

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By: Elizabeth Parga M.S. Chemistry