The American Physiological Society launched Physiology Understanding Week (PhUN week) as an outreach program that would build connections between scientists and trainees and K-12 students/schools by bringing “citizen scientists” into the K-12 classrooms, thus providing teachers with professional development that could sustain excellence in science education. The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is similar, but more targeted at public education in general. Both models transform scientists (faculty and trainees) into advocates for, and participants in, excellence in science education, and both effectively inform the public about the benefits of biomedical research. At UAB, our PhUN week activities reach about 1,500 students and 30 teachers each year with inquiry-based educational opportunities in physiology. These have been an entrée to a larger cooperation between UAB scientists and teachers, resulting in many formal and informal programs. The school year programs include school year classroom programs that are aimed at supporting the existing science curriculum, e.g., the UAB School of Science and Math (high school), the Hands-On program classroom program (middle school) and ALAHASP for K-5 students and teachers. Summer programs position the students to be peer leaders by training them in the principles underlying the areas of science that they will encounter in the next school year. But much of the effort in both PhUN week and other UAB programs are geared to insure that teachers have excellent teacher professional development opportunities. Thus each summer we train teachers in curricular areas but perhaps more importantly provide them with opportunities to teach in the summer programs, in which they can experiment with inquiry-based education to a much greater extent than they can in the classroom during the school year. Such training is especially important for teachers in urban classrooms in which classroom management concerns often disallow them the freedom to be creative. Overall, UAB’s programs reach about 80,000 students and 3,000 teachers each year in Alabama, and now reach internationally, giving us the opportunity to test out education outreach in different settings. In each program, the emphasis is on training the students to be leaders in their curriculum and exciting the students about the promise of science careers, an element especially important for underrepresented minority students.