GROWing in the Lab
High school women get hands-on experience in scientific research
Delaney Griffiths (left), a senior at Westwood High School, gets some advice about her experiment from mentor Kelsey Williford (MED’21), a neuroscientist, as part of the GROW program, which brings area high school students into BU research labs for the summer. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
Delaney Griffiths spends bright summer days in a darkened BU biology lab, using the scents of two monomolecular organic compounds to teach an odor-discrimination task to mice in a two-room cage. Smell A, stay put. Smell B, move to the other room. It’s one step in long-term research into the brain’s processing of sensory information.
In the fall, Griffiths will go back to Westwood (Mass.) High School to begin her senior year.
Griffiths is one of a dozen Boston-area high school students selected for the first year of BU’s GROW (Greater Boston Research Opportunities for Young Women) program, which brings promising female students into the laboratory for a six-week taste of the research life.
“I knew that I wanted to have an internship and to be in a research lab doing hands-on activities,” says Griffiths, who works in a darkened lab because mice are nocturnal. “I wanted to find out if I really enjoy research, so I can make some decisions for the future.”
“It’s very different than what they experience in a high school lab,” says Cynthia Brossman (COM’94, SED’12), director of LERNet, BU’s Learning Resource Network. “At BU, they are immersed in a lab culture—working as part of a collaborative team on open-ended questions, with cutting-edge technology and resources, with undergraduates and grad students. They become part of a community and are engaged and excited by this process.”
“One of the first things I read [about GROW] is that you get paired up with a one-on-one mentor, which was very appealing to me,” says Griffiths. “Now being in it, I know that having a mentor who’s invested in you and is going to teach you everything they can is really important.”
“She’s incredibly motivated and eager to learn,” says Kelsey Williford (MED’21), a grad student in neuroscience and Griffiths’ GROW program mentor. “And she’s very attentive to the small details, which is especially important with behavioral studies.”
The students work in the lab of Ian Davison, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of biology who is studying the neural basis of sensory perception. While many GROW students may not go on to careers in science, says Davison, those who do will be well-armed for the many decisions ahead in the long process of making a career.
“One of the ways we can increase the participation of women,” he says, “is just to create the assumption that, ‘Of course I should be here doing this, this is what I’ve been doing since high school, and this is what I love to do, so why would I do any different?’”
Griffiths says at her high school, the boys are definitely more interested in science than the girls. Last year she took an advanced placement physics class, and there were only five girls among the 16 students. In her BU lab, she notes, “We have more women than men.”
LERNet was created in 1998 to provide programming for K-12 students interested in pursuing the STEM fields and to encourage teacher development. In recent years, Brossman says, she has become more focused on young women, because they face a gender imbalance in STEM fields. The GROW program came into being this year after Deborah Perlstein, a CAS assistant professor of chemistry, came to Brossman looking for ways to broaden the impact of a research project so that it would satisfy a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant requirement. After her project was funded for one student, they decided to go further.
Brossman and Perlstein put together a program with funding from sources including Vertex, Pfizer, and other companies; LERNet; the chemistry and biology departments; CAS; BU’s ARROWS (Advance, Recruit, Retain & Organize Women in STEM); and existing NSF grants, all adding up to about $30,000. Despite a late posting of the application, in April, some 60 rising juniors and seniors from Greater Boston high schools applied. A dozen students were placed in BU chemistry and biology labs and assigned research projects and graduate student or post-doc mentors.
“I wanted to create an accessible program for local students who may not be able to afford some of the existing programs or who needed to work during the summer,” Brossman says. “We wanted to give the students a stipend so we could eliminate any financial barriers to participation.”
The students receive a weekly $250 stipend for working in their labs from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each weekday. They also meet regularly with a program manager who monitors their work, visit local biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and learn about career options from outside speakers. They will present their research at a final symposium on August 12.
They also attend weekly seminars where scientists talk about other cutting-edge work in BU labs. A recent guest who impressed Griffiths was Horácio Frydman, an associate professor of biology who studies the interaction of microorganisms and their host cells.
“One of his big-picture ultimate goals is to end the transmission of diseases by mosquitos,” Griffiths says. “It’s some really amazing stuff that can help people worldwide, so just to see that is happening at BU is pretty impressive.”
GROW isn’t the only new program for high schoolers that Brossman organized this summer. There’s also Codebreakers, a three-week cyber security program at the BU Computer Lab for young women who are rising sophomores or juniors. Graduate and undergraduate program coordinators will teach students to program in the Python computer language, then move on to cryptography and network security. It’s intended to build on the popular Artemis Project, an existing computer program for rising ninth grade girls.
For GROW, Jennifer Talbot (CAS’04), an assistant professor of biology, welcomed Ameerah Gadatia, a rising senior at Billerica Memorial High School, into her lab to study soil bacteria and fungi when they interact. Ten other people in the lab are relying on the data that Gadatia is collecting, Talbot says.
Talbot’s interest in GROW stemmed from her own undergraduate experience in chemistry, when she did not have the confidence needed to raise her hand in class, much less to respond productively to the discouragement she felt from peers because of her gender.
“Programs like GROW help students learn those skills early,” she says. “It teaches students who may be overlooked or discouraged from STEM that they have what it takes to perform well in research, to have confidence in their problem-solving skills, and to pursue challenges, rather than shy away from them.”
Brossman hopes to double the size of the GROW program next summer and to expand it beyond the biology and chemistry labs.
Griffiths plans to major in biology in college. “I’ve always been interested in neuroscience,” she says, “and seeing Kelsey every day, doing her own experiments, her own lab work, it’s definitely empowering and making me think that this is something I can achieve.”
Author, Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@bu.edu.