Student Researchers Present Findings at Annual Science Meeting
- April 26, 2010
Department of Energy student interns present their research findings at the annual AAAS conference.
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held recently in San Diego, Calif., a group of 18 promising young student scientists joined the international assembly of scientific experts to present their Department of Energy-related research.
The student presenters participated in 2009 internships through the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) and the Faculty and Student Teams (FaST) programs sponsored by the DOE Office of Science and The Office of Workforce Development for Teacher and Scientists (WDTS).
“This [meeting] is great exposure for young scientists as they begin thinking about where to attend graduate school and decide which career path to take,” said Sam Held, the program coordinator at Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Fourteen of the 442 SULI interns and 4 of the 130 FaST interns from the 2009 internship cycle were selected to present their science research projects during a student poster session at the AAAS meeting.
The student posters covered an array of DOE-related science — from improving flexible solar cells to fusion energy to bioremediation.
"These undergraduate students represent the Nation's future highly skilled technical workforce," said Bill Valdez, Director of WDTS within DOE's Office of Science.
The student presenters were selected based on their final internship reports, similar to a journal-quality scientific paper, a requirement of many DOE internship programs. “We received excellent nominations from the DOE National Laboratories, and it was difficult to review them and narrow it down to just 18 for the AAAS meeting,” said Shannon Dunphy Lazo, the WDTS Program Manager and Editor of the Journal of Undergraduate Research.
Joanne Osburn, a non-traditional student studying biology and chemistry at the California State University – East Bay, conducted her research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “I developed a new statistical model to determine the source of a pathogen,” said Osburn. In her study, Osburn used data from a well-documented transmission of the HIV virus by a dentist in Florida. “The goal [of my project] is to have a quantitative method [to track a pathogen], such as in the case of bio-terror.”