Budding Scientists
Move over, Einstein. Take a seat, Darwin. Here comes Amy Chen.
The Torrance High School senior is conducting research into a subject some people have trouble even pronouncing: paleomagnetism.
In a USC laboratory, Chen is charting a history of the Earth’s magnetic field with chunks of blackish sediment scooped from deep below the Pacific Ocean.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she jokes as she plots a squiggly graph on her computer that looks more like a Rorschach test than a scientific record. “I spend lots of time playing with the data.”
Chen, 19, is no ordinary student. And this is no ordinary research venture. She is getting the chance to apply her smarts through a program that links promising high school students with researchers throughout Southern California.
The Research Training Program, run by the Southern California Academy of Sciences, is one of a growing number of similar partnerships across the region.
The other projects include one at UCLA that invites high school students to conduct molecular biology experiments on sickle cell anemia. In May, a separate initiative at Caltech will link up researchers from the Pasadena campus with Los Angeles Unified School District students to study high-energy cosmic rays.
Chen’s training program takes such partnerships one step further. The students, working with mentors at USC, Cal State Long Beach and other sites, conduct research, write technical papers and present their findings at academic conferences.
Chen is working with USC geophysicist Steve Lund.
Another student, Kristin McCully of Rancho Palos Verdes, is teamed up with an education specialist at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. McCully is studying the effect of nonnative Japanese oysters on the ecosystem of Los Angeles Harbor.
A third teenager, Sarah Appleman of Irvine, is working with the chief scientific officer at Phage Biotechnology Corp. in Tustin. She is attempting to use organic molecules in green tea to kill cancer cells.
In all, eight students are working on Research Training Program projects this school year. The initiative has placed about 1,000 high school students in university labs during the last 20 years.
“I really sacrifice my social life for this,” said Appleman, 16, a junior at Northwood High School in Irvine, who hopes her work will one day lead to a cure for cancer. “I don’t really get to go out on weekends anymore.”
While this year’s students are in the midst of their research, last year’s participants are reporting their findings to the scientific community.
Five of the teenagers will present their papers Thursday and Friday in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.
The papers’ titles read like a foreign language. Consider this one by 16-year-old Christel Miller: “Immune Response of Neonatal Rhesus Macaques to Recombinant Simian Immunodeficiency Virus Using Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay.”
Translation: How effective are certain vaccines in treating macaques with AIDS-like conditions?
“My little research could influence further research,” said Miller, who attends the California Academy of Mathematics and Science, a public school on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Her work already has earned honors in two prestigious contests. She was a semifinalist this year in both the Intel Science Talent Search and the Siemens Westinghouse Science and Technology Competition.
“I work hard and I like to learn,” she said.
Miller and the other budding scientists are a brainy bunch. They throw around terms like “cyclicity” and “polyphenols” the way other teenagers spout off the newest rock ‘n’ roll lyrics from ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys.
Of course, their youth occasionally shows through. Chen, who can be found every day after school and most weekends in the USC laboratory, has pinned pictures of Richard Dean Anderson--the hunky star of the television show “MacGyver”--on the tack board above her lab computer.
But behind her impish smile, Chen is pure intellect.
On a recent day, she sorted through dozens of tiny plastic containers, each one holding a piece of dried sediment. The samples were drilled from beneath the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia and the Philippines by a crew working for USC and the University of South Carolina.
Chen is using the material to measure variations in Earth’s magnetic field around a portion of the equator, over the span of 100,000 years.
The work is part of a broader project being conducted by Chen’s mentor, Lund. He said that Chen has impressive analytical skills and an added quality that students with more experience often lack: a willingness to accept uncertainty.
“Her work has been very substantive,” Lund said. “What she has done is clearly publishable.”
The lab work is only part of Chen’s life. She also takes three Advanced Placement classes at Torrance High and tutors five middle school students in math. But her real passion rests in the lab.
“I love it,” she said. “You’re putting pieces together on something that no one else knows. It’s cool.”
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Inquiries about the Research Training Program can be made by e-mail at Myopick@aol.com, or by calling founder Gloria Takahashi, a science teacher at La Habra High School, (562) 905-0903. Applications for next year’s program are due May 26.
