The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2007
What do these accomplished University of Arizona researchers have in common?
Caitlin Casey studies high-redshift quasars, the most distant luminous objects in the universe. She’s looking at their spectra, trying to understand what the intergalactic media — the “stuff” between the stars — was like in very distant times. By doing so, she hopes to better understand the large-scale structures of the universe …
David Hernandez models the universe through computer simulations based on data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite monitoring Big Bang background radiation. His work may one day explain why 4 percent of the universe seems to be composed of atoms, the building blocks of stars and planets, while 22 percent is mysterious cold, dark matter, and a whopping 74 percent is dark energy …
Kate Spriggs works with professors and graduate students in computer science as well as plant pathology, psychology, and mathematics to develop 3D models of molecules, Mars typology, the human heart — you name it — that seem to hover in thin air before astonished visitors to the UA’s immersive virtual reality environment, allowing researchers to better understand physical reality …
Lara Schaheen studies endocytosis, a process of cellular ingestion by which the plasma membrane folds inward to bring substances into the cell. Specifically, she’s trying to determine what happens when that complex process breaks down, triggering a rare genetic disease of early childhood called mucolipidosis, which causes cells to store materials they would normally eliminate, leading to progressive damage …
Nikolai Dahl creates many of his own laboratory testing protocols as he explores allergens created by the spores of a common desert mold, Alternaria, the most significant contributor to childhood asthma in the Tucson area …
Laura Goodman (not pictured) conducts a double-blind clinical study of green tea versus black tea versus a placebo, to try to determine if these substances reduce the oxidative damage cigarette smoking does to human cells. She takes blood, cells, and other samples from 150 volunteer participants …
Juan Mena Gonzalez (not pictured) looks at how the brain’s neuronal synapses — the specialized connections facilitating information transfer — develop. He studies the structure of fruit fly brains, dissecting them and making images of the neurons under a confocal microscope, looking for the physical changes brought on by learning and memory formation …
They’re all — or, in some cases, were until recently — undergraduate students.
by Dan Huff
Jacob Chinn photos
While their peers at other schools often don’t have the opportunity to do cutting-edge scientific work until they’ve entered graduate-level programs, more than 63 percent of the 3,000 or so undergraduates in the UA College of Science participate in independent research projects, according to a recent internal survey.
This is worth noting because the United States is facing a rapidly escalating challenge to its century of global leadership in technology and scientific research. Today, India and China graduate hundreds of thousands of science and technical students each year (see related article, Scientific Competition in a Global Economy), compared to tens of thousands in the U.S. The only way for America to meet this rising challenge in the 21st century, a steady stream of increasingly alarming reports have concluded, is to make American science education the very best in the world.
“Hands-on research experience for undergraduates is essential to maintaining American preeminence in science,” says James M. Gentile, a geneticist and president of the private Research Corporation, the first foundation to support scientific inquiry in the U.S., beginning in 1912. “Among other things, it’s great for developing critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills as well as encouraging intellectual independence — precisely the qualities required of the world’s top scientific minds destined to face tomorrow’s most complex and baffling problems.”
As Albert Einstein reportedly said, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
Or, as UA undergraduate computer researcher Kate Spriggs observed before graduating this past summer, “There is no research without dark moments. This is what research is about — you search, you search, you research, and you search again.”
While nearly all classroom test questions have “correct” answers, Spriggs pointed out, the questions researchers ask in the lab rarely do.
And Lara Schaheen, an undergraduate researcher in molecular and cellular biology, picked up a major bit of lab wisdom that will serve her well in her chosen field of medicine: “In research, there’s a big difference between being efficient, which is doing something and getting it done properly, and in being effective, which is learning how to get the right things done.”
It’s precisely these sorts of insights into the difficulties and subtleties of real-world scientific inquiry, proponents argue, that make undergraduate research such a profoundly powerful teaching tool.
As a bonus, undergraduate researchers often develop important mentoring relationships with the research professors, also known as principal investigators, who run the UA’s cutting-edge projects — relationships that help students transition more easily to graduate science programs. One study noted that while students see themselves as learning scientific procedures and acquiring technical skills in the lab, the professors who supervise them often see them as undergoing an even more valuable socialization process that leads to full membership in the scientific community.
Also, many principal investigators simply enjoy having bright, enthusiastic undergraduates in their labs, says College of Science Associate Dean Gail Burd. A molecular and cellular biologist, Burd has trained more than 50 students to do independent research over the years, and she adds that undergrads “can become very good at what they’re doing. I usually try to bring them into the lab as freshmen or sophomores and keep them the whole time. That way they gain confidence and experience equivalent to a second-year graduate student.”
It can be a good deal for the students financially, too. Many undergraduate research jobs at the UA pay about as much as students could make working part-time jobs off campus, but with all the learning opportunities the world of science has to offer.
Steve Larson, a scientist in the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, says, “The direct, personal interaction undergraduates have with their professors (while doing research) allows them to see the human side of scientists — something usually missing in the classroom. This is a great opportunity for them to see if research might be their cup of tea.”
Juan Mena Gonzalez, for example, studied for his high school diploma at Mexico’s University of Guadalajara and then moved to Yuma, Arizona, where he learned English at a community college. He came to Tucson to attend the UA and earn a degree in electrical engineering, but one year into his university career, he found himself researching brain circuitry in Dr. Shanker Karunanithi’s neurobiology lab. He kept the job for the following three years.
“In the beginning, it was complicated because I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Gonzalez says. “There was no panic, but I had a lot of questions. I needed to work next to someone, a post-doctoral student, most of the time. The lab isn’t that big, and there were a few people working there in the beginning, but eventually it was only Dr. Karunanithi and me.”
Gonzalez says his intellectual enthusiasm tends toward the “more precise” subjects of mathematics and electronics, rather than the unknowns inherent in testing brain synapses and neuronal circuitry, but Karunanithi has been trying to interest him in biology all along. His mentor seems to be winning — by last spring Gonzalez had signed up for a postgraduate internship in molecular neurobiology at New York’s Columbia University. And, Gonzalez adds: “I’ve been doing some research on different universities, and there are some people who actually apply electronics to biology.”
College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz, a geoscientist, points out that many areas of research today are “interdisciplinary,” in such hybrid fields as biophysics, nanotechnology, quantum information processing, and molecular biology. Even so, the grassroots culture at the UA is such that undergraduate researchers are free to go well beyond even the currently conceived interdisciplinary guideposts.
Thus an engineering major like Gonzalez, who expects to be designing electronic devices, finds himself helping to tease out the secrets of the brain.
But the UA’s informal, “no boundaries” research culture works in even more surprising ways. Molecular and cellular biologist Johnny Fares is the principal investigator in a lab looking at vesicle trafficking (vesicles are tiny chemical reaction chambers within individual animal cells). Fares knew that undergraduate researcher Lara Schaheen, who’d worked in his lab since her freshman year, is a medical school hopeful working toward becoming a thoracic surgeon one day. (About 43 percent of College of Science freshmen indicate that they’re pre-med students.) So he helped her to get some clinical experience, with University Medical Center pediatric transplant surgeon Dr. Kimberly Gandy, M.D.
Already, as an undergraduate, Schaheen has four research papers to her credit, two as first author. And although in Fares’s lab she continued to look at how defects play out in the CUP5 protein in animal cells — which, if we’re lucky, may eventually reveal a thing or two about a rare but deadly childhood disease, mucolipidosis IV — Schaheen soon found herself occasionally boarding private jets with other members of the UMC transplant team and returning with harvested donor organs. In her spare time, Schaheen also set up Second Breath Children’s Foundation (www.secondbreath.org) to help cover the $150,000-plus cost of childhood lung transplants.
Schaheen is the first to admit her experiences in the UA’s research culture have prompted her to alter her future plans.
“When I first came here, I thought I was going to just do a straight M.D. track and go right on to surgery,” she says. “But research teaches you to really ask questions. It changes the way you think. Now I’m going to apply to MST (medical science training) programs, because I don’t want to go into an M.D. program and lose my ability to ask questions and be curious.”
She adds that while she’s probably still going into surgery — and she already has a few ideas on how to improve the transportation of donor organs — her UA research experience has motivated her to be constantly “trying to figure out ways to improve my chosen field through research.”
It would be hard to imagine a better-prepared first-year medical student. And it’s understandable, then, that College of Science admission officials say they often field calls from parents who want their children to attend the UA based primarily on what they’ve heard about the wide-open research opportunities.
It’s a reputation that has been roughly two decades in the making, beginning with the late Mike Wells, a UA biochemist, who created the Undergraduate Biology Research Program (UBRP) in 1988.
“Mike was head of the biochemistry department,” recalls Carol Bender, Wells’s successor as UBRP director. “He was concerned about the fact that they were graduating a lot of biochemistry majors, but nobody was going on to graduate school. Everybody was going on to medical school. He wondered where the next generation of scientists was going to come from.”
One day, when a student asked Wells why there seemed to be people in the UA’s Biosciences West building at all hours of the day and night, including weekends and holidays, something clicked, Bender says. Those people in the building were researchers, of course, and the question gave Wells the idea to bring students into the process.
“He thought that if we involved students in research, maybe more of them would be interested in research careers and would go on to graduate school and become scientists,” Bender says.
Hypothesis confirmed. “If you look at the number of undergraduate students who’ve done research,” Associate Dean Burd observes, “roughly 28 percent of them say they’re going on to graduate school. Meanwhile, of the students who haven’t done research as undergrads, only about 10 percent say they’re planning to do graduate work.” Among pre-med students, she adds, about 9 percent who do research go on to medical school right out of college, versus only about 1.5 percent of those who don’t.
Obviously, participating in UBRP or the other major undergraduate research initiative on campus — including the NASA Space Grant program, focusing on space, environmental, earth, and related physical sciences — isn’t required. And, indeed, many students, like budding theoretical astrophysicist David Hernandez, prefer to strike out on their own looking for campus research jobs.
Hernandez, who’s majoring in physics and astronomy, says, “Since we have one of the top astronomy departments in the nation, to not take advantage of that and work with one of the faculty, would be undermining the possibilities of my education.”
He spent last year developing a computer model hoping to explain the apparent superabundance of mysterious cold dark matter in the universe. This past summer, he hustled up his own funding from the UA Honors College to support his research work in Germany.
But those who join the UBRP or space grant programs, as well as smaller programs within the College of Science, get more formal training in the ways of UA research labs.
UBRP students — there are about 140 during an average year — are required to put in full-time hours during an intensive, 12-week summer training, for which they’re paid, says Carol Bender. “And if they have 15 hours a week to devote to researching during the academic year, when they have competing demands on their time from their classes, they can stay on if they want to.” About 90 percent of UBRP participants continue year ’round, she says.
The Arizona Space Grant Consortium, last year supported 64 undergrads on the UA campus and 120 statewide (the program is an outgrowth of the land grant university system initiated by President Abraham Lincoln). It provides a closely monitored and richly mentored research experience, to a wide variety of students.
The big programs also encourage students to make poster presentations and explain their work to all comers at local and national scientific conferences. “It ain’t research unless you can communicate the results to your fellow scientists,” as Research Corporation’s James Gentile puts it.
For UA undergraduates, the results can be gratifying.
In the case of the Space Grant program, funding limitations mean a student’s mentored lab experience has to end after one year. “But in a good majority of the cases,” says Arizona Space Grant Manager Susan Brew, “when a student has done well, fits in, and becomes an integral part of a research group, the principal investigator can usually come up with the funds to keep those students on. There are labs at the UA where there are three and four generations of Space Grant interns working together.”
Unfortunately, money is always scarce, which is why UA College of Science officials are planning a more concerted effort to solicit private donor support as well as legislative funding for undergraduate research in the coming years. Supporting this method of learning is absolutely vital, they argue, if Arizona and the nation are to prosper in the 21st century.
“As rewarding as the research experience can be for our undergraduates,” Gentile says, “it could be far more rewarding for our nation as a whole.”
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