Credit: N. AKGULIAN/IMAGES.COM/CORBIS

The US National Lab Day programme has begun to gain traction after initial problems recruiting interested scientists. The initiative, first proposed last summer by President Barack Obama and the federal government's Office of Science and Technology Policy, aims to boost school children's interest in science by linking scientist volunteers with teachers, school administrators and students aged 6–17 years. Through its website (http://www.nationallabday.org), interested scientists or teachers can be paired up automatically or can choose a particular scientist or teacher partner.

Despite its name, National Lab Day is a long-term programme that began recruiting last November. Partner organizations include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Chemical Society and the National Science Foundation. The Jack D. Hidary Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation have helped to fund the initiative.

NIH director Francis Collins lamented an initially poor response from scientists during his 13 March address at the annual meeting of the National Postdoctoral Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Concerned, Collins sent a message in early March to all NIH employees and principal investigators on NIH grants, urging them to take part. The call-to-arms helped, according to Bruce Fuchs, director of the NIH Office of Science Education in Bethesda, Maryland. In January alone, 436 scientists and 826 teachers had signed up; in March, the number of scientists leapt to 1,022. As Naturejobs went to press, 2,518 scientists and 3,068 teachers had signed up in total.

From 1–12 May, participating communities will celebrate the collaborations, with activities culminating on 12 May. NIH-funded investigator Charles Brenner, head of biochemistry at the University of Iowa's Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, learned about the initiative from Collins's message. He plans to visit classes of biology students aged 15–16 at a local high school on 12 May, where he will use yeast to demonstrate cellular lifespan and to show cells' ability to form colonies at different ages. “They always find it interesting to look at cells under a microscope,” Brenner says, recalling past visits.

Global warming will be the focus for climate scientist Thomas Charlock's live webcast on 22 April. Charlock's contribution is part of the National Lab Day efforts at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. He will demonstrate the difficulties of measuring atmospheric radiation, which affects climate-change predictions, to teachers of students aged 8–17. He hopes to incite student interest in the topic and maybe even motivate a future scientist to one day invent a better radiometer.

“A lot of kids, and teachers too, have no real idea of what scientists do and what science means,” says Gina Schatteman, an American Association for the Advancement of Science policy fellow at the NIH Office of Science Education, who is on the programme's steering committee. “The Obama administration recognized that teachers and kids both need to understand the scientific process, and who better to show that than the people who do science themselves?”