Tim Renz, Principal Investigator and CEO of Bulldog Biotech has spent his entire career of 30+ years in the Tukwila School District. The district was named the Most Diverse District in the Nation by a study done by the New York Times in 2010. FHS is the only high school in our School District. We are a high poverty school with no majority ethnic/racial group. Our students come from all over the world. Many from refugee camps. Many were born into these refugee camps. They come here for a better chance at a better life. Especially in the sciences, they come to us with very limited hands-on experiences to support their learning. 

Not only are we diverse, we are also at an economic disadvantage with about 75% of our students qualifying for free/reduced lunch. We have about 8% of our students in special education and 31% qualify for transitional bilingual services. Although many, many more have recently exited out of these services. We are a four-year public high school with an enrollment of about nine hundred and fifty students.

Over the last decade or so, Mr. Renz has made it his mission to leverage his many privileges to provide opportunities and experiences for the students here so that they may differentiate themselves from the more privileged students that they have to compete with for internships, scholarships and college admissions. We are a global majority school, with no single racial group making up more than 50% of our population. The vast majority of students involved with this project would be classified as historically excluded from the sciences. 

Mr. Renz has been developing a Biotech program since about 2013 or so, and has brought in equipment and supplies through donations, grants and leveraging the very limited district budget to build a lab that would rival many college labs and some industry labs. The vast majority of our equipment and supplies has been obtained through grants and donations from the very generous Biotech Industry partners we have been able to connect with. We have a decently equipped lab, probably better than most High School Biotech programs but we are also trying to build a bigger and better program. One of the main reasons for needing to build such a lab setting is due to the fact that our students are not very mobile. They can't get into the South Lake Union area for an internship, so we are trying to build a lab that PIs will be assured will produce as valid results as if it was being done in their own lab. That will allow the students to do their "internship" here at the High School. All the lab work would be done here, the results would be sent back to the PI for inclusion with their results. We did this in 2019 in a collaborative yeast evolution project with Dr. Bryce Taylor out of the Dunham Lab in the UW Genome Sciences Department. 

Our students ask and answer their own questions. By having a wide variety of equipment and supplies, the limits on the questions that students can answer isn't narrowed due to a lack of equipment. We will often bring in equipment from donations that we have no idea what to use it for. An interested student will take on the task of figuring it out. They go and do the research and teach it to others. Once the students know what something can do, they run with it. One of our most recent additions to our equipment is an illumina MiniSeq NGS Whole Genome Sequencer. The students are already coming up with some amazing ideas on how to best utilize the miniSeq to answer the questions that are impacting their communities the most. Our first project is going to be based on Gut Biomes. Students are looking to not only identify the members of each biota from a diverse group of samples, they are also looking to see if they can find correlations between racial, gender, age and lifestyle choices. 

We are also always in need of equipment and consumables, including plastics, reagents, enzymes, DNA ladders, etc. We don't mind if they are "expired" as we aren't using them for publishable research, at least not yet. As mentioned earlier, we will take just about anything even if we don't know what it is for, we will figure it out. We appreciate any donations, large or small. 

Ways to Donate