September
5, 2003
Students
Present Research in Summer Science Symposium
More
than a dozen original scientific research projects were presented
at a symposium at the College on Friday, July 25, marking the
end of this year’s Mount Holyoke Summer Science Program.
Projects conducted during the eight-week session ran the gamut
from the evolution of stick insects to the interpretation of digital
images of salt marshes.
The 25 participants, most of whom were MHC students, hailed from
fields as diverse as biology, chemistry, physics, and geography.
Funding sources for individual lab work included the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute, the National Science Foundation, and the Cascade
Mentoring Program.
Some students presented a single project that they had spent all
of June and July pursuing, others presented projects that they
had done while rotating through several labs for eight days at
a stretch—getting a quick, introductory taste of a different
field each time.
“There was some nice work done in a short period of time,”
noted Frank DeToma, Professor of Biological Sciences on the Alumnae
Foundation, director of the science center, and director of the
Howard Hughes Program Grant. (MHC administers the summer science
program as one part of a four-year, $1-million grant given to
the College by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to involve
students in scientific exploration. Mount Holyoke was one of only
52 institutions to receive the HHMI grant, out of 189 institutions
that applied.)
“This is a miniature scientific symposium, in which students
write up one-page abstracts and make PowerPoint presentations—with
some faculty help, of course,” DeToma said. “I knew
the students were a little apprehensive at first about this kind
of public speaking, but I think it was a good experience. They
will be glad they did it.”
One of this summer’s Cascade projects was conducted by Kristen
Coakley ’04, Deborah Crabtree ’06, and faculty adviser
Gary Gillis, assistant professor of biological sciences. The trio
spent eight weeks making and analyzing high-speed digital videos
of mice on a treadmill. They inserted electrodes into the muscles
of the mice, recorded their activity, and matched the information
from the electrical impulses precisely to the tape. In this way,
they hoped to find out more out about how the nervous system activates
limb muscles during locomotion. They found that the longer the
initial burst of electrical activity from the nervous system,
the longer the stride duration of the mouse. At faster speeds,
stride durations become shorter, as do bursts of muscle activity.
The team learned other things as well. “It was great to
be with a professor in a situation like this, where there’s
only three of us in the lab all day,” said Coakley, who
plans to study the effects of caffeine on rat locomotion this
fall. “You get very personalized attention, you learn at
a quicker pace, and you get to do small-animal surgery.”
The laboratory experience,
according to Coakley, also gives students an extra edge when applying
to graduate school or job hunting.
The goal of the Cascade
Mentoring Program is to give rising sophomores and rising seniors,
under the supervision of a faculty member, an opportunity to conduct
laboratory research on a project that the rising senior has begun.
The experience gives the rising senior a taste of what it’s
like to teach by mentoring the rising sophomore, who learns, through
intense one-on-one training, how to conduct scientific research.
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