The Iowa Sciences Academy offers several opportunities to participate in research during the summer, either on campus or off campus. During the summer of 2024, twenty-eight ISA students participated in a summer research experience.
All ISA students can apply to the ISA Summer Program, an on-campus program that lasts for eight weeks. Students are expected to attend weekly seminars, work in a lab twenty to forty hours per week, and present a poster at the Summer Undergraduate Research Conference at the end of July. Twenty-six students are in the on-campus ISA Summer Program this year.
One of the programs housed in the ISA is the Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program, an NIH research fellowship for undergraduate students. Students in the MARC program have special opportunities to pursue a MARC Summer Research Experience (SRE), which typically last for at least 8 weeks with an off-campus research program, but students may also participate in University of Iowa on-campus programs. These SREs broaden and deepen students’ research training opportunities by allowing them to participate in activities or labs that may not be available at the University of Iowa. The MARC program can offer financial assistance to help defray costs of the SREs. This summer, three MARC students participated in SREs – Fabiola Castaneda-Santiago, Liz Elias, and Klaertje Hesselink.
Fabiola Castaneda-Santiago was accepted into the 2024 summer cohort of the Interdisciplinary Evolutionary Sciences REU program at the University of Iowa, which lasts for 10 weeks. A major component of her training involves independent research with Dr. Andrew Forbes in the Biology Department at the University of Iowa. The REU program offers hands-on classroom, lab, and field-based research experiences. Time is included for structured meetings and independent research within the mentor’s laboratory. By the end of the summer program, Fabiola will have completed an independent research project in collaboration with Dr. Forbes; learned from graduate students and faculty about graduate school, including application and admissions processes; presented a scientific poster at the University of Iowa Summer Undergraduate Research Conference; and created a digital version of her poster to be shared online.
Fabiola learned about the interdisciplinary evolution REU program through her mentor, Andrew Forbes. She says that “After looking into the program further, I thought this would be a great opportunity to further develop my research experience.”
When asked what she is hoping to gain from the summer experience, Fabiola states that she has goals to “hone my field research skills. More specifically, I am learning how to both identify tree species and measure their ages. Later this summer, I plan to utilize GIS where I will map the progression of forest densities.” Up to this point in the program, Fabiola is “in the process of collecting data for my project. I’ve been spending every day outdoors studying the many species of trees that make up Iowan forests. One of my favorite experiences so far has been going to Lake Macbride and witnessing the incredible emergence of periodical cicadas.”
Liz Elias, another ISA MARC student, was accepted into the Pediatric Oncology Education (POE) Program at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. This program offers a unique opportunity for students preparing for careers in the biomedical sciences, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, psychology, or public health to gain biomedical and oncology research experience. The POE program provides a short-term training experience in either laboratory research or clinical research.
Liz found the opportunity because her current PI, Dr. Dawn Quelle, did her postdoc at St. Jude. Liz says that “Dr. Quelle spoke very highly of the institution, and since my current research focuses on a tumor that is more prevalent in pediatric patients, I decided to look and see if St. Jude had a summer program. I was searching for external summer research experiences for this summer, but my search was mostly contained to the NSF-REU website. However, St. Jude’s POE program is not funded by the NSF like most REUs, so I found it directly on St. Jude’s website.”
Looking forward to what she will gain from this summer experience, Liz attests that “I have been a part of research at Iowa for almost three years and wanted a chance to experience working at another institution. While I have done both data science and informatics research and cancer biology research, I have only done them in separate labs, so I was looking for a summer internship where I would get to work at the intersection of biomedical and computer sciences.”
So far, Liz has enjoyed the experience of the summer program. She says that “I really like my research group, and St. Jude has an incredibly diverse team of researchers from across the globe, so it’s been really cool to meet people from every continent who are here doing research. I was also given a lot of autonomy over not only what project I would be working on this summer, but also with the project itself. Memphis does have its unsafe areas, but the program director made sure that POE’s were living in safe areas.”
A third ISA MARC student, Klaertje Hesselink, was accepted into the Electric Vehicle Center Undergraduate Research Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She will be working with Professor Eranda Nikolla on the development of metallic nanoparticles for metal air batteries. She will be utilizing both experimental techniques and computational techniques to synthesize and characterize these nanoparticles. Klaertje will also be joining a group of about twenty-five students in the program on batteries and in the sister REU programs. The program includes research seminars and professional development talks in addition to students’ research projects. During the last week of the program, students will give short presentations on the research projects.
Klaertje, a rising junior in chemical engineering, has written about her summer experience so far: “This summer, I am studying metal oxide catalysts at the University of Michigan as a part of Dr. Eranda Nikolla’s lab. I first became intensely involved in research the summer after my first year by attending the Particle Based Functional Materials REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at the University of Pittsburgh, where I studied the stability of trimetallic nanoparticles. I loved the experience of exploring research at other universities, so I decided to apply again this year, focusing on graduate schools I was interested in. I browsed through the NSF ETAP portal, which has a collection of REUs and departmental websites at different schools, to find new opportunities. As I participate in computational research at the University of Iowa, I was primarily looking to explore experimental research this summer and identify whether I want to incorporate more experimental research into my career.
So far, I am around a week and a half into my internship, and I have to admit, it was challenging to transition from computational work to the unpredictable nature of experiments. My primary lab experience so far has been through my general and organic chemistry labs, so I have never run an experiment longer than a few hours. The research itself is exciting, and I feel incredibly grateful for being here and learning so much from my mentors.
In my free time, I have explored the vast University of Michigan campus and the delicious food in downtown Ann Arbor. I have become close with most of my cohort, which comprises four different engineering science programs, and have enjoyed exploring with them. I look forward to seeing where the next few weeks take me!”
To learn more about Summer Programs offered through the Iowa Sciences Academy, visit the ISA Summer Program Website, the MARC program website, or email ui-isa@uiowa.edu.
- Article by Hailey Odell