Bringing evolution education into action

The BEACON Center is an NSF funded Science and Technology center that brings together evolutionary biologists, computational scientists, and engineers. Our funding model for education and outreach is a competitive one, and we aim to bring novel multidisciplinary and multi-institutional projects to diverse audiences. Our challenge is to improve the general public’s understanding of evolutionary processes, and yet evolution is a complex topic requiring an understanding of processes across a number of levels of biological organization.  We therefore use evolution in action examples, inquiry, and experimentation to show people that evolution happens, and evolution works.