by Rebecca Hu
2009 Distinguished Award Recipient
This past summer I was part of the Young Women in Science Program (YWiS) in Richland, Washington. The YWiS Program offers current juniors and seniors in high school the opportunity to participate in a research appointment at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). As their website states, this program “provides an eight-week summer research experience that includes four days each week assigned to a scientist-mentor in a specific research area and time each week devoted to educational-, career-, and leadership-development activities involving laboratory demonstrations, field trips, team-building and communications workshops, and career awareness.”
Current juniors and seniors in high schools from nearby school districts who meet certain criteria can apply online. Applying for this program is pretty straightforward and does not take too much time. Applicants are required to answer the questions in the online application, submit their transcript, obtain two academic recommendations from high school faculty, have their counselor review their application and submit an online counselor endorsement form, and finally be interviewed by potential mentors.
This summer I joined the statistics department at the lab under my mentor, Dr. Greg Piepel, and co-mentor Brett Amidan. The project we worked on deals with the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States. Following the attacks, many studies were conducted to develop validated sampling methods and statistical sampling plans to provide confidence in true negatives—meaning that when a surface is tested to be negative for anthrax, there really is no anthrax present. My mentors and I summarized the characteristics and results of many of the studies (published in microbiology journal articles) in Excel spreadsheets, and then I condensed the spreadsheets into Word tables, which will be included in a journal article my mentors are writing. The purpose of this project is to identify significant gaps in performance information for sampling and analysis methods. This will improve future environmental sampling studies involving anthrax or surrogates.
My summer at the lab was truly an enriching experience and I strongly encourage other students to pursue similar opportunities. One thing I have learned about myself is that I really enjoy working with others and being in a lab environment. I have gained insight into many fields while in the lab, including statistics, biology, engineering, computer science, and even psychology. Working at PNNL has given me a clearer idea of what a career as a scientist holds. Simply working alongside highly intelligent scientists was an amazing experience also.
For more information about YWiS and other student research opportunities offered by the Pacific Northwest National laboratory (including undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs), check out their website: http://science-ed.pnl.gov/students
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