Des Moines high school student Arun Velamuri plans to go into medicine some day and says a summer academic camp he attended at the University of Iowa this summer helped him see what his life as a medical scientist might be like.

“At school we can only do small experiments that you can finish in a class period. Real research is not so compacted,” he says. “We’re here for five weeks, which is longer than anything we can do in school, but even that is only a small part of the overall project. The study I’m contributing to has been going on for over a year.”

Velamuri is participating in the University of Iowa Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP), which draws some of the country’s and the world’s brightest young minds to experience life as scientific researchers at a major university.

Students will present their research findings from labs in UI departments including engineering, biology, biochemistry, pharmacy, computer science, microbiology, obstetrics & gynecology, neuroscience, nursing, anatomy & cell biology, psychology, and public health. Students have been working ontheoretical and hands-on research with real-world implications and have created posters to describe their findings.

Nearly 40 students from as far away as South Korea and as close as Iowa City participated in SSTP this summer. The five Iowa students involved in the program, are listed below.

• Sweta Sudhir, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• Nicholas Beckwith, Clinton, Iowa
• Lorraine Pereira, Davenport, Iowa
• David Wu, Iowa City, Iowa
• Arun Velamuri, West Des Moines, Iowa

SSTP is administered by the UI College of Education’s Connie Belin and Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development.

Velamuri is working with Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology Ed Wasserman, in the UI Department of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, on a project to see if pigeons can learn to discern between cancerous and noncancerous cells. Wasserman has worked with SSTP students for 40 years and says he enjoys the opportunity to demonstrate what doing science is really like.

“It’s like a tapestry,” he says. “You weave all of the threads together like narratives of a story.”

Cedar Rapids junior Sweta Sudhir says she was looking forward to gaining hands-on lab experiences through SSTP and was not disappointed.

Sudhir is working with Tina Tootle, an assistant professor in anatomy and cell biology, in the Carver College of Medicine, to learn more about a protein called actin. Actin is known for giving cells structure and shape in the cytoplasm, but scientists have little understanding of its purpose in the nucleus. Sudhir’s work is laying the foundation for future studies and, Tootle says, will guide a whole new direction for her lab in the coming years.

“It astounds me that as a person who’s going to be a junior in high school I’m able to work with something so complicated and that it might help with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. We don’t know yet, it has endless possibilities,” she says. “To know I’m involved with something that can have such broad implications is really amazing.”

Tootle says SSTP helps fill a need for encouraging bright young students to pursue careers in science.

“There’s a real concern in the cell biology field that we’re not getting students into sciences and we’re losing way too many people who are never exposed to science,” she says. “Programs like this are fundamental for actually having the next generation of the work force in the science fields.”

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all UI-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to attend this poster session, contact Kate Degner in advance at katherine-degner@uiowa.edu or 319-335-6213.