School for Science and Math students Katie Roland, left, who attends Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet School, and Isaiah Bolden, who attends Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School, with the School for Science and Math’s director, Angela Eeds, Ph.D. (photo by Mary Donaldson)
High school science students score in national competition
Two seniors in the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt have been named semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search 2011 research competition for U.S. high school seniors.
Isaiah Bolden, a student at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School, and Anna Katherine (Katie) Roland, who attends Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet School in Nashville, each received $1,000. Matching awards were sent to their public schools.
This is the first time students at the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt (SSMV) have been recognized by the Intel Science Talent Search, said school director Angela Eeds, Ph.D. Bolden and Roland and the rest of the graduating class of 2011 also are the first to attend the full cohort of courses offered at SSMV, beginning in the freshman year.
Launched in 2007 as a project of the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach, SSMV is a joint venture between Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools.
Students receive instruction in the classroom and laboratory from Vanderbilt scientists one day a week. The rest of the week they attend their regular high schools. Seniors also complete a summer research project at Vanderbilt.
“We are grateful to the Vanderbilt community for supporting this program, and we appreciate the research laboratories and mentors who provide internships for our students,” Eeds said.
“Our goals are to foster scientific communication, critical analysis, and the application of research to real-world situations.”
Bolden's winning research project was conducted in the laboratory of Louise Rollins-Smith, Ph.D., associate professor of Microbiology & Immunology and of Biological Sciences. It was titled, “Effects of environmental pesticides on growth of a pathogenic fungus and fungus-fighting bacteria isolated from amphibian skin.”
Roland's project, conducted in the laboratory of David McCauley, Ph.D., professor of Biological Sciences, was titled “Genetic diversity among mitochondrial genes of Daucus carota,” a wild form of the cultivated carrot.
Roland also was one of four SSMV seniors to receive semifinalist recognition for their research projects in the 2010 Siemens (formerly Westinghouse) national science competition.
The Science Talent Search was established in 1942 by the Society for Science & the Public, first in partnership with Westinghouse and, since 1998, with Intel. Seven past honorees have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, and 11 have received MacArthur Fellowships, the so-called “genius grants.”