Ten women undergraduates from the College of Science for Women at the University of Baghdad will be spending the summer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The program is part of the State Department’s NeXXt Scholars Initiative which seeks to encourage women from Muslim countries to study in STEM fields.
The students, who have studied English, will be accompanied by two faculty members. The students will take courses in biology, engineering, American studies, and the English language. For two of their four weeks, the Iraqi students will participate in a Molecular Biology Boot Camp where they will conduct laboratory experiments in genomics and bioinformatics in Smith College’s new science and engineering facilities.