OUR STORY
John Doleman
Founder
Seeds of Change
Mission
Seeds of Change, Inc. (SOC) is a Minnesota 501(C)(3) non-profit corporation with a mission to encourage high school students to pursue science-related careers. SOC accomplishes this by immersing students in original research experiences that ignite a passion for science.
SOC programs deliberately relate real-world problems of enormous consequences for our global community to student research. Our mission is to use these authentic, original research experiences to begin a process of changing the way science is taught in our secondary school systems.
SOC Founder’s Vision:
Develop Costa Rica STEM Science Immersion Programs
John Doleman, a former program manager at Control Data, the prime contractor for the NASA Phase A Space Station Design, founded Seeds of Change in 2010 to “Change the Landscape of Secondary Science Education.”
His vision is to develop STEM programs that catapult students directly into the research discovery process well before they are in graduate school or college. By partnering with multiple world-renowned university professors that recognize the need to galvanize interest in the sciences through hands-on, original research Seeds of Change laid the groundwork for today’s multi-faceted science research immersion programs at Seeds of Change.
These programs deeply engage students in tropical field research, ecology, marine research, comparative genetics (bioinformatics) and insect-microbiome antibiotic bioprospecting.
Dr. Adrian Pinto
Honorary Director
Seeds of Change Science Curriculum
Dr. Pinto is an exceptional educator: Listen to his TedX talk
(turn on cc/subtitles in settings ⚙ & translate to English).
Link Student Research to Critical Issues Facing Our Global Community
The first Costa Rica Research Immersion Experience was undertaken in 2010 with a young pioneering teacher, James Stanton (currently one of the SOC on-site coordinators), with students from a Minnesota public school, Robbinsdale Cooper High School. The program content grew out of the research of a world-famous tropical researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (Dr. Cameron Currie). The experiential curriculum was developed by Dr. Adrián Pinto, Currie’s former graduate student, now a full professor at the University of Costa Rica. Dr. Pinto is the SOC Honorary Chief Scientist and he, Dr. Currie and another lead SOC instructor Heidi Horn, played a key role in the discovery of Selvamicin (2016), an antibiotic isolated from Costa Rican leafcutter ant colonies. Seeds of Change intends to establish a research infrastructure and environment where students can contribute to and make their own discoveries that help solve critical issues facing mankind (like antimicrobial resistance).