College and high school students take research to another level at USC Aiken’s Summer Scholars Institute

By: Danielle Wong Moores 

On the third floor of USC Aiken's Sciences and Engineering building, Senior Instructor Neil Miller and recent graduate Ian Murray are each hunched over their laptops, crunching data into graphs that depict the thickness of the earth's ionosphere at any given point in time. Two floors below, high school student James Saxon of the Aiken Scholars Academy is tagging zebrafish so Dr. April DeLaurier can study them for a specific genetic anomaly.

Both projects are part of USC Aiken's Summer Scholars Institute, which is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy and ADP (Automatic Data Processing).

Over the past five years, the summer program has introduced 135 students from both USC Aiken and Aiken high schools to the rigor of scientific research and the excitement of being part of work that could influence the body of study in a particular scientific field. This year's program welcomed approximately 20 USC Aiken students and 7 local high school students.

"We're training students how to be scientists—and they get paid to do it—every summer," says Dr. William Jackson, Professor of Biology and Chair of the Department of Biology and Geology, who oversees SSI. "It's 10 weeks in a lab working on various projects with a faculty mentor in biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, exercise or sports science."

For Murray, it's his fourth year of being part of the program. The chemistry major, who will be continuing graduate work in that field at Texas A&M University in the fall, worked on projects with chemistry professor Dr. Nicholas Marshall during his first two years in SSI. With Marshall, Murray designed and built a project related to his personal interests in surface science and nanotechnology. He used a chemical process to achieve a 10-fold increase in the speed by which certain molecules layer themselves on a surface—a technique with practical applications, such as developing surfactants and coatings for jets, for example.

Now, for the last two summers, Murray's been working side by side with Miller, a physics and astronomy professor, to explore the impact of earthquakes as well as gamma rays from space on radio communications.

The projects under Marshall and Miller have been very different, but for Murray, they both are the kind of work that challenges his abilities as a scientist. Although his focus has been chemistry, "I'm not one type of person," he says. "I don't like doing just one thing." SSI, he says, has been "the best of both worlds…It's been a big steppingstone. One, it allowed me to think critically but also to think realistically and put something into practice."

The work with Miller, which focuses on radioastronomy—the study of radio frequencies coming from space—adds to an existing body of study that suggests changes in the earth's ionosphere can affect ground transmissions. Both gamma rays and shifts in the earth's surface affect the thickness of the earth's ionosphere,causing radio transmission blackouts to occur, affecting military and first responder communications.

Together, the student-faculty pair crunched about a decade's worth of data using the RStudio programming package to single out gamma ray activity and earthquake activity. For both, it's been a fascinating look at how other specialists in these fields mine and analyze data. And for Murray in particular, the work is practice for his future career: "I'll be going to grad school for chemistry, but for my career, I've been thinking about going into a mix of doing physical experiments and computational chemistry. So, getting this experience with RScript and my organic chemistry background helps me out in the future for that. There's a boom in data science and very valid job opportunities, so there's no limit."

High school student James Saxon is also thinking about his future. An incoming senior at Aiken Scholars Academy, which has a dual enrollment program with USC Aiken, Saxon plans to become a doctor and researcher. He says that being matched with DeLaurier, a professor of biology, in the SSI program is giving him invaluable experience that he believes will help him stand out from the competition on college and medical school applications. "I'm showing that I've already been in a lab at a college—things that a high-schooler wouldn't normally get to do," he says. "If you want to go into academia, what an incredible way to start."

On this Wednesday afternoon, Saxon is sampling tissue from zebrafish for genotyping—to discover if they carry a specific genetic mutation associated with a rare disease known as Holt-Oram syndrome, which, in humans, is associated with heart and limb defects. Because zebrafish are 70% genetically identical to humans, they offer an ideal model system in which researchers can manipulate genes to better understand and even help prevent disease.

Through her National Institutes of Health-funded research—via an INBRE grant, designed to build biomedical research capacity and encourage student participation—DeLaurier hopes to one day help develop a line of zebrafish that other labs can study as well to develop a treatment and even a cure. "When you lose this gene, what are the knockout effects of that? We can try to identify those targets," she says. "Right now, with the way science and medicine are, we don't have a really good way to intervene in utero for these types of diseases, but potentially someday there might be and we'll have laid the groundwork."

Saxon remembers first learning about DeLaurier's research during a USC Aiken tour and seeing a research assistant using micropipettes to study zebrafish. "I genuinely thought there was no way I'd ever be doing this here, but a year later, I'm doing the things I saw being done, and it's just as cool, just as wondrous," he says. "I'm learning so much in such a short amount of time—outside of the classroom, hands-on. That's an experience I would wish to give to anyone."

While these types of lab programs are common at the undergraduate level, DeLaurier adds that few include high school students. As a recruitment tool, it seems to be working: Although Saxon is from Aiken, "USC Aiken was not on my map as a college," he says. "But being here has shown me that USC Aiken is just a good as any other college in the state. It's become my number one."

"What he's doing is original research," adds DeLaurier, who plans to publish a paper on her work in the future, which will include the names of all the student researchers who have worked with her, including Saxon. "This isn't just a student project, it's actually new investigation into this gene."

And as much as the summer program benefits the students, it benefits the professors and instructors as well. Says Miller, "Research is very stimulating. When I was just teaching and that's all I was doing, I was getting bored to be honest. I went to my department chair at the time and said I'd like to do some research projects. We at this university can study these things—we don't have to work at NASA or work at a major university to do projects like this."