- April 25, 2024
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Whitney Laboratory’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program interns: Omar West, Belle Weimer, Kaleena Davis, Arianna Rodriquez, Isabella Cisneros, Monica Deadmond, Yongxin Zheng, Drew Thompson. Courtesy photo
REU Intern Isabella Cisneros. Courtesy photo
REU Intern Isabella Cisneros. Courtesy photo
REU Intern Omar West. Courtesy photo
REU Intern Omar West. Courtesy photo
by: Hannah White
Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, University of Florida
The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, funded by the National Science Foundation, provides undergraduate college students with the opportunity to perform scientific research, and for many of those students, it’s their first time delving into such work. For more than 30 years, the highly competitive summer program at Whitney Laboratory on the border of St. Johns and Flagler counties, has been introducing students interested in science to hands-on research experience through both rigorous laboratory and fieldwork.
This summer the program at Whitney Laboratory hosted eight interns for 10 weeks from June 2 to Aug. 10 to explore the career of scientific research, where National Intern Day was celebrated July 29. This year, Whitney Laboratory welcomed Isabella Cisneros from the University of Chicago, Kaleena Davis from Southern Illinois University, Monica Deadmond from Southern Oregon University, Arianna Rodriquez from the University of South Florida, Drew Thompson from the University of California, Belle Weimer from Nova Southeastern University, Omar West from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Yongxin Zheng from Washtenaw Community College. These interns were selected from a pool of 212 applications received from students across the United States.
Each student is paired with a faculty supervisor at Whitney Laboratory to work on a research project that is both of interest to the student and aligns with the laboratory’s ongoing investigations. The REU interns address different scientific unknowns and generate new knowledge by the end of the summer. This year the research conducted by the students explored a range of topics, including evolution, development, regeneration, natural products chemistry, and sea turtle disease.
“Most students ‘lab experience’ involves following a set of instructions that gets them results that are already known before they even start the experiment! Real research involves delving into the unknown, generating new data that have never been seen before, and using all means possible to interpret the data to hypothesize on what it means, and what important set of experiments to do next. THAT is the fun part of doing science,” says Whitney Laboratory Director Dr. Mark Q. Martindale.
During the internship, students also take part in intensive workshops, field trips, presentations and research symposiums. Every year, an alumni intern returns to give a presentation to the current REU students about career paths in the scientific industry. The alumni speakers selected to present to the students range from those who have careers in academics to those who have chosen other paths in the science industry. This year’s speaker was Hannah Nelson, a PhD student from University of California, Davis who was an REU student at Whitney Laboratory in 2012. Hannah’s presentation was on the ecological factors affecting the geographical distribution of colonial organisms, as well as educational research on students’ perception of biodiversity.
“We keep in touch with our REU alumni, and a large percentage of our students go on to have successful careers in science-related fields. Promoting careers in science and training future biologists is an important part of our mission here at the Whitney Laboratory,” said Dr. Joseph Ryan, Associate Professor of Biology at Whitney Laboratory.
As the summer internship concludes, everything the students learned during the program comes together when they share their research project and findings through both a presentation to the Whitney Laboratory faculty and employees and during a poster symposium. Determined through a voting process, the student with the winning project receives a trip to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting where they will once again present their poster.
In 2016, Whitney Laboratory received a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue to fund its REU program. The foundation, established by Congress in 1950, is an independent federal agency that supports basic research and education in science and engineering.
