In September of 2015, the Citizen Science Association, announced the organization of a National Citizen Science Day which was scheduled for April 16, 2016. Unfortunately, the announcement went unnoticed by many San Diego citizen science project groups, and we were able to (just barely) assemble a San Diego Citizen Science Day Expo in time for the event. To avoid the last-minute planning of our event, we attempted to start the planning for our next event back in September of 2016–but there was a problem. We weren’t able to ascertain when (or if there even would be) another Citizen Science Day. For this reason, we moved forward with our planning for a San Diego Citizen Science Expo to be held during the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering Week–on March 11th.

Currently, we have over 16 different projects which will be exhibiting at this event, and we have a keynote speaker from the American Gut project which uses citizen science and crowdfunding to catalog the American gut microbiome. If you are in San Diego and are interested in other ways you can contribute to science, mark your calendars! The event will be at the La Jolla public library and there is no cost to attend. If you have free time and would like to help us staff the Mark2Cure table, please get in touch! We could really use at least two volunteers for the event. Come hang out with us and meet with other local Mark2Curators!

World Rare Disease Day is fast approaching (February 28th) and the theme this year is ‘Research’. Because rare disease advocates, patients & family have been an important part of Mark2Cure’s foundation, we will be running a week-long event in anticipation of Rare Disease Day. Mark4Rare will begin on February 20th and run to February 27th. During this time, we encourage Mark2Curators to announce the rare disease they care most about and complete quests in the name of that disease. We will aggregate the contributions during the Mark4Rare campaign and leverage it to raise awareness for the diseases of interest to our Mark2Curators through our social media channels. To sign up for the Mark4Rare event, please fill out this form. Please note, that only contributions between February 20th and February 27th will count towards Mark4Rare.