March 9, 2006
UW prof mentors high school student to research success
In a laboratory in Hitchcock Hall, two researchers talk softly as they huddle over a piece of specimen-mounting equipment for a confocal microscope. One is a highly respected research associate professor; the other is a high school senior.
The professor is Dina Mandoli of the UW Department of Biology and Center for Developmental Biology. The student is Jolene Mork, a talented and ambitious 17-year-old from Shorewood High School in Shoreline who is working with Mandoli to prepare for one of the highest honors and challenges a young science student can have.
Mork is one of only 40 high school students nationwide — and the only one from Washington state — named as a finalist in the annual Intel Science Talent Search, a student science competition that has been likened to a sort of Nobel Prize for the secondary school set.
Of the honor, Mork says, “I was amazed I was a semi-finalist. So many people spend their childhoods building up to this.”
Today, March 9, Mork is at the Science Talent Institute in Washington, D.C., preparing to present her research to a panel of judges. Having been chosen from among 300 semi-finalists, Mork is already certain of $5,000 in college scholarship money, but the competition’s top 10 winners each get scholarships ranging from $20,000 through $100,000. Winners will be announced on March 14.
Since meeting several months back after an e-mail the student sent to several professors looking for research help, Mandoli has mentored Mork, helping her discover how to pursue, clarify and present her research. That they look like colleagues, even friends, while working together says a lot about how Mandoli runs her lab and offers her mentoring help.
Mandoli stresses collegiality and cooperation in her lab as tenets virtually as important as the research itself. Introducing her “lab rules” online, Mandoli states, “Over 50 percent of science is in smooth communication of your science. Often the success of your career rests in complex ways on how you perceive and respect your accomplishments and those of others.” And while most lab rules are proscriptive, stating which sins of process and hygiene to avoid, Mandoli’s resonate more positively: Rules one through four are as follows: Be happy, Play, Play with Others and Be responsible.
If the title of Mork’s research project — Comparative Autofluorescence of a Unicellular to a Multicellular Plant: Acetabularia acetabulum vs. Arabidopsis thaliana — does not lend itself to immediate understanding by the nonscientific mind, it’s no matter. Mork helpfully describes her work in simpler terms, saying, “I’m currently looking at autoflourescence in plants at the apex to see if it changes as the cell is growing — or if it can show you anything about how the cell will grow.”
Mandoli adds the following illumination: “Jolene’s data suggest that native fluorophores predict the next shape that the apex will generate.” She adds that to prove that’s true, “we need to demonstrate that the arrangement of the fluorophores on the interior of the cell changes shape before the exterior wall of the cell locks that shape into place. …If true, this may give us insight into mechanisms of shape change in plants because either the fluorophores themselves or molecules they are closely associated with are effecting shape change.”
And if it sounds a little unusual for an undergraduate to be conducting research that will likely find its way into a scientific journal, it’s not unusual for Mandoli. She says she has mentored dozens of students in her time both at the UW’s Friday Harbor labs and on the main campus.
“Most of my undergraduates who have worked on the main UW campus have published their work in a peer journal,” she says. Though Mandoli stresses that advancing science, in any context, is always “a brick at a time,” she also notes, “definitely these undergraduates can make contributions to the foundation of human knowledge.”
Such seems the case with Mork. Already, the National Science Foundation has contacted Mandoli over its plans to include a brief item (they call them “nuggets”) about Mork’s work in its annual report to the government. “Jolene has much to be proud of,” Mandoli says.
The Intel Science Talent Search competition, while important, is just one of many destinations along Mork’s path of discovery. As important as these events are, the journey — the mentoring relationship, and learning to work and solve problems smoothly together — is no less key to success, for Mandoli.
“Talent is one thing,” she says, “but the capacity to work well with yourself and others is really important, too.” Of Mork, Mandoli says, “She’s obviously very bright, obviously well motivated, and she’s a self-starter.”
A mentoring relationship is best, Mandoli says, “When silence is OK, when interrupting is OK, when ideas are flowing and when the students, when you ask them, can develop their next experiment based on the information from the first.”
For her part, Jolene Mork appreciates Mandoli’s guidance as well as her discretion in knowing when to step in and when to let Mork find her own way. “A lot of my experiments have begun with her suggesting things to me, and I admit I don’t know what comes next. We talk about what the next steps would be.”
Along with their concern about fitting a specimen correctly for use in the confocal microscope, Mandoli and Mork also were discussing building a gravity perfusion chamber (“perfuse: to sprinkle, cover over or permeate with, or to suffuse as with a liquid”) and how to provide adequate controls. “We must be sure that photographing the cell does not change what it is doing. These microscope lights can emit heat that can literally cook live cells. One way to keep the cells cool and healthy is to circulate the seawater in which they grow while we image them.”
Mork describes a situation one day, however, where specimen slides were compromised and she had to build a different type of chamber for the photography. Mandoli provided help over the phone but Mork did the work. She says, “I think it was good for me to have to do it for myself and not have someone to walk me through it.”
Such minor stumbles, and worse, are all part of the mentoring process, Mandoli says. She tells students she works with that the first quarter can be especially tough. “Invariably, they will hit a wall. My job is to set them in a research direction of their choosing and then, once I set them upon that path, my job is to let them go.” She adds, “Most of the time, the ‘wall’ is personal.”
In such learning moments, mentors, not unlike parents, need to know when to offer help and when to hold back. “When a student wants to fly — and this is an important point in a mentoring relationship — you’ve got to push them out of the nest.”
But ideally, Mandoli says, “Mentoring evolves to where it’s a collaboration, building synergy with each other’s experiments.” That’s becoming the case with Jolene Mork, too. “She’s on her way to making it a collaborative project,” Mandoli says. “The initial interaction is a top-down process but that disappears if you’ve been successful.”
The measure of Mandoli and Mork’s success as a mentor-student team, then, does not lie wholly with the fate of Acetabularia Acetabulum and Arabidopsis thaliana, or with confocal microscopes or gravity perfusion chambers; it lies with the two of them.
And as Mork steps before a panel of judges that she says might ask her anything at all science-related, she is well prepared.
No matter how she does in the competition, it seems she and her mentor already have succeeded.
To learn more about the Intel Science Talent Search, visit http://www.intel.com/education/sts/.
To learn more about Dina Mandoli’s research, visit http://faculty.washington.edu/mandoli/.
