Summer program inspires Upper School students

Every day at 8 a.m. last summer, seniors Nikitha oduguli and Charlotte Purcell waited at the DART Parker Road Station to board a train to the University of Texas Southwestern’s Medical Center campus. ere, they embarked on an eight-week immersive research internship alongside other science-enthused high school students across the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

oduguli and Purcell were participating in the STARS Summer Research Program, a non-residential summer program sponsored by UTSW Medical Center.

“ e STARS program is designed to give folks that don’t have connections to the university world and give them a look into the research process,” Upper School Science Department Chair Treavor Kendall said. “Students are able to see what science looks like in action.”

It’s a highly competitive program, and students must submit an application along with teacher recommendation letters to begin the selection process.

According to the Associate Director of the STARS Program Lynn Tam, the goal is to give everyone equal opportunity to participate in research and level the playing eld for all students.

“Our hope is that students from the program will continue to have that zeal for STEM that sparks something for their futures,” Tam said. “Ultimately, many of them end up inspiring the next generation of STEM students, which is really our end goal.”

At 9 a.m. each day, oduguli and Purcell, along with senior Hannah Zhou, arrived at UTSW Medical Center, which became their classroom, research laboratory and work home for the rest of the summer.

Working alongside Professor Douglas Strand in computational biology, oduguli studied the genomic expressions of the female urethra, researching standards and characteristics of urethra samples to inform future medical treatment.

“I didn’t really have a background in urology, but the stu that Dr. Strand was doing was speci c to genomics and computational biology, which were areas that I had already expressed interest in,” oduguli said. “Even though it was a eld that I was not fully aware of, it was still very interesting to get to apply the same techniques to a di erent eld.”

Despite having never taken a urology course, oduguli remembers learning about genetics in Advanced Placement Biology last year and falling in love with how it allowed scientists to predict o spring genetic traits and markers. oduguli would start her day with some morning coding. en, she switched gears to staining female urethra tissues using genetic markers from previously collected bioinformatics data, before returning to coding during long breaks in RNAscope, the immunostaining protocol.

“ is sort of genetic engineering mind was something I wanted to hone some more, and the STARS program gave me a di erent and more expansive perspective on this study,” oduguli said.

Her STARS program aligned with her background in coding with genetics, allowing her to study large data trends in a manner that would be impossible on a human level.

For Purcell, the STARS program was an opportunity to get in a lab and see if she wanted to pursue research in the future.

“Research is de nitely a tedious process, and it’s a lot of failing and tweaking small things to try to get a result,” Purcell said. “But I really enjoyed the process experience because when it does produce the results you want, it looks amazing.”

Working with Danielle Robertson, an ophthalmologist with a doctorate in optometry, Purcell focused on the meibomian glands, which are glands in the eye that produce an oil that prevents the eye from drying up. Meibomian gland dysfunction is a leading cause of dry eye, which is what Robertson’s lab was studying.

Purcell worked on producing a staining methodology to help distinguish di erent tissues and cell types from each other. Her work was mostly individual, but she also worked with other members of Robertson’s lab in helping clean samples or collect data.

“In the lab, I had to gure out what I had to do myself and become more of a selfadvocate,” Purcell said.

As someone who has always loved science, Purcell really enjoyed the hands-on lab and research experience.

“It feels like you’re actually doing a lot of important research and you get to work with scientists and Ph.D. candidates,” Purcell said. “It’s really cool because you get to talk to people who know a ton about science and the human body.”

Zhou chose to focus more on psychiatry, which meant more work in dry labs and statistical analysis. Zhou’s dry lab work included studying data entries and running them through SPSS, a statistical analysis so ware.

Working with Professor Sherwood Brown, Zhou studied the e ects of depression and mental illnesses on asthma patients.

Zhou ultimately found correlations between performance on psychiatric tests among children and quality of life in regard to asthma-related conditions.

“My mentors worked in pediatric psychiatry and a lot of that does have correlations with asthma and other conditions, so I got to really study the physical impact of these things for people my age,” Zhou said.

Zhou says their experience at STARS was an eye opener to a future career trajectory that they hope to embark on. As a prospective psychiatrist, Zhou says that working alongside research experts and having more exibility in their research topic helped enrich their love for psychology.

“I thought [STARS] was really insightful into the type of research I want to do in the future,” Zhou said. “It was fun going through the experience in a dry lab, but I also hope to branch out and try some other research stu in a wet lab.”

Another part of STARS for students is presenting research results.

“When I came into the program, I was unsure of how pursuing a career in STEM would allow me to explore the same social justice, debate, sort of persuasion activism stu ,” oduguli said. “But it was really nice to hear that those skills could still be extremely applicable within the eld of STEM because of the way that research and grants operate.”

Besides the skills and scienti c inspiration gained by both oduguli and Zhou, they also reaped tangible bene ts from STARS. For instance, Zhou’s paper on the impact of depression on asthma patients is set to be published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“ e feedback we get is that Greenhill students come prepared and have a solid foundation to begin working on original research questions,” Kendall said. rough the program, Kendall hopes that research-oriented students can open themselves up to the eld.

“Sometimes students love science and nd out that they aren’t excited by research, and I think this experience will help them understand the open-ended nature of research and if they want to continue to pursue it,” Kendall said. “Doing original research is a very di cult and rewarding eld and STARS is a glimpse into that world.

Tam would like to see UTSW Medical Center provide more hands-on STEM opportunities for students in the future.

“I think the program really opens their eyes to so many possibilities that they never could have dreamed of, and I want to bring that transformative experience to more students,” Tam said.

Even though Greenhill has been cooperating with the STARS program for years, Kendall hopes that the relationship will continue to develop.

“What I hope for is a continued, strong partnership with UT Southwestern, with more students potentially becoming involved,” Kendall said. “ ere are other ways to get involved outside of the research arm, and I would like to see our students engage in that as well.”