October 26, 2006
A summer of science: Interns thrive in summer program
By Claire Dietz
News & Community Relations
Other summers, Araceli Vasquez had worked with her family in the beet fields of southern Idaho. This summer, she came to the UW to be one of the first group of students to participate in an undergraduate summer research program developed by the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine.
Although other programs provide summer experiences for both pre-college and undergraduate students, it is rare for a department to develop its own summer program and come up with the resources to support it.
The organizer, Rory Murphy, the department’s manager of graduate student services, said that the summer program grew out of discussions about diversity initiatives.
“It’s very well accepted that providing research internships or other hands-on experiences for undergraduates is an effective way to interest students from minority or underrepresented groups in science. A program like this offers them a chance to learn about research, particularly as it is practiced in our department, and about the education and training involved in the work,” she said. The focus was on students from the Pacific Northwest.
Murphy first identified three organizations with high numbers of underrepresented students that the program could partner with: the Ronald E. McNair Program, administered by the UW Office of Minority Affairs; the Health Sciences Center’s STAR (Stipends for Training Aspiring Researchers) Program, funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; and Heritage College in Yakima, Wash.
She then wrote an internal application for departmental funds to support the program. When the project was funded, Murphy was able to identify and match five summer research internships to the top applicants. Four positions were funded by the department, with the fifth supported by the STAR program.
“When I asked for faculty volunteers to work with the students, I got a lot of replies from our faculty, offering very high-quality research experiences across a range of disciplines,” Murphy said. The faculty preceptors included an environmental microbiologist, an occupational medicine physician/researcher, a toxicologist and two specialists in exposure assessment. Several graduate students volunteered to run weekly research discussion groups for the students.
Vasquez, who was a junior last year at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, learned about the summer opportunity from her adviser. She plans to apply to medical school after she completes her undergraduate work, so she was looking for something that would give her experience related to science or medicine.
She looked at the Web page describing the program and the various research slots available, and then she promptly applied.
“I didn’t even realize that I would be working with farmworkers,” she said. “But that was a big plus for me.”
Like the other students, she had a volunteer faculty mentor. Dr. Matthew Keifer, associate professor of environmental health and of medicine, directed her work with a Yakima Valley-based community health project. Jennifer Crowe, a former graduate student in the department who was employed as the research coordinator, was her immediate supervisor.
Vasquez was doing interviews for a community health survey, one of several efforts under way as part of El Proyecto Bienestar, “The Well-Being Project,” which teams researchers and students from the UW with Heritage College, Radio KDNA and the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic to identify and address occupational and environmental health issues among area farmworkers.
The overall project is funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s part of a growing trend at the UW to establish community-based participatory research projects, which are guided in part by community needs and usually have community advisory groups.
“I didn’t realize that you could do research work that is based in a community,” Vasquez said. She also became more aware of the health concerns that agricultural workers and their kids face, one focus of the work in the Yakima Valley.
She had already formed a desire to become a doctor, Vasquez said, but her experience in the summer program widened her view of the possibilities. Now she is thinking about adding public health training to her medical studies.
“I think I would like to be like Dr. Keifer,” she said, “and work on projects that could really help communities and individual people, too.”
Working in another part of the state, Brandt Pein, a UW undergraduate who is a chemistry major, was getting some practical experience in data collection and lab testing, dipping into Tulalip Bay for water samples that would be taken back to a UW lab. Brandt was part of the federally supported STAR program and worked with mentor Dr. John Scott Meschke, an environmental microbiologist who is an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences.
“I’m planning to go to graduate school, and I’m thinking of becoming a microbiologist,” Pein said. “So I wanted to do some work related to that.”
Once he was out in the field, or the bay in this case, Pein learned about some of the trials and tribulations of research field work, including possibly contaminated samples. The work in Tulalip Bay, which he did with graduate student Clarita Lefthand, uses Environmental Protection Agency methods to evaluate water samples for viruses and bacteria. Shellfish quality and human health are affected by the types and amounts of bacteria and viruses in the water.
Near the end of the summer program in mid-August, the five summer interns in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences joined the 60 STAR/IMSD (Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity) students who were participating in their annual summer research poster session. Emile Pitre, UW associate vice president for minority affairs and diversity, was a speaker and encouraged all of the students to pursue their hopes for careers in medicine and other health professions.
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In addition to the students in the story, these undergraduates took part in the program this summer:
- Christopher Diangco, with mentor Dr. John Kissel, working on human exposure to environmental contaminants.
- Amina Negash, with mentor Dr. Jane Koenig, working on respiratory and cardiac health effects of air pollution.
- Dustin Palm, with mentor Dr. Michael Yost, working on measuring exposure to chemicals and other environmental agents, including noise and heat.
