Three high-academic-performance students of secondary school: Laura Valenciano López of the IES comarcal, Ana Gutierrez Benajas of the IES Patraix - Vicenta Ferrer Escrivà, and Carmen Haukes San Lázaro of the CP San Juan Bosco, visited Tuesday 22nd and Wednesday 23th of May the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), joint centre UV-CSIC. Ciència ARA is a program of scientific activities offered by the Delegation for the Incorporation to the University of Valencia that pretends to answer the demand of secondary schools that pose the need to attend students with high capacities and/or high performance through activities that favour their curricular enrichment and capacity development.

The visit began 9 am Tuesday May 22nd at the institute in the Universitat de València Scientific Park, where the three students were received by the organizer, professor Emilia Matallana, who explained them the structure and scientific aims of the Institute, and introduced basic concepts in Systems Biology. Then, the students visited some of the special facilities of the institute, accompanied by the head of technical services Consuelo Escrivà, and also the biotech partner company Biopolis, where the technical development manager, Carles palanca, explained them some of their services and products, achieved thanks to the perfect gear science-company. The first day of the visit concluded with the visit to the centre for data treatment and storage at the I2SysBio, where professor Wladimiro Díaz approached them to bioinformatics tools, fundamental in Systems Biology.

In the second day, also from 9 am to 2 pm, Laura, Ana and Carmen had the opportunity to know the research topics of three of our scientists: Evolutionary Biology first-hand from  Rosario Gil, Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology first-hand from Manel Porcar, and Virology, Evolution and Health first-hand from Rafael Sanjuán.