One thing is certain about undergraduate research in the life sciences: It’s not kid stuff.
By Elaine McArdle - Photography by Channing Johnson
On a blustery November afternoon, senior Robin Ortiz is perched on a stool in a Northeastern lab, performing brain surgery on rats.
“I love research,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily, given the obvious intensity of her focus.
The significance of her work calls for razor-sharp concentration. It’s part of a larger National Science Foundation– funded effort aimed at designing new weapons against Parkinson’s disease. Under the direction of pharmaceutical-sciences professor Barbara Waszczak, Ortiz is looking at how rats respond to potential treatments for the devastating neurological disease, with the ultimate goal of furthering treatment for humans.
Ortiz, a behavioral-neuroscience major, expects research to be a big part of the rest of her life. After she graduates, she wants to get a joint MD/PhD, then work as a practicing physician and a researcher.
“I’m passionate about becoming a doctor, but I’m only applying to medical schools that have a research component, too,” she says. Cancer research, in particular, intrigues her, as does the mind-body connection in health and medical care.
How’s the current research going?
“So far, so good,” says Ortiz, who also makes time each Sunday to work at a hospice with dying patients. She has mixed feelings about experimenting on animals, she says, but “it looks like the rats are actually benefiting from the therapy we’re giving them.”
Ortiz’s part in the larger research effort is being funded by a grant from Northeastern’s provost’s office, money that has helped her purchase supplies and covered the cost of attending a neuroscience conference in San Diego.
Although graduate research is a mainstay at all universities, Northeastern takes pains to introduce its undergraduates to the research realm, too, recognizing the educational value of getting students involved early in scholarly and scientific exploration. The societal contributions that result are an added bonus.
“Research benefits the student by providing the opportunity to learn critical skills such as knowledge creation, analytical thinking at the deepest level, and effective teamwork,” explains Susan Powers-Lee, executive vice provost for undergraduate education. “It also enables both an immediate, deeper understanding and an enhanced ability to engage in lifelong learning.”
Three years ago, the provost’s office established a grant program for funding undergraduate research. In 2004–2005, twenty-six undergraduates were given research grants.
Last year, the provost’s office gave sixty-four research grants to eighty-two undergraduates (some of them worked in teams) across a wide range of fields, from mechanical engineering to human services, nursing to speech pathology. Of those grants, more than a third went to life sciences– related projects.
Powers-Lee is pleased with the growth of the research awards. “We’re aiming for a hundred funded students in 2007–2008,” she says.
Any undergraduate conducting research under the supervision of a faculty member can apply to the provost’s office for a research grant—which may run as high as $1,000—to help purchase supplies, travel to research sites, or defray other costs.
In choosing recipients, provost-office staffers look for a clearly stated hypothesis, approach, and budget rationale, along with a solid understanding of the project’s context and significance.
After their research is complete, students are required to write a paper or otherwise submit the results of their work. In addition, the university encourages them to present their findings at a campuswide event, such as the Experiential Education Expo, held each spring.
Not every undergraduate enjoys the “search” in “research,” says Waszczak. “It requires patience, tolerance for frustration, persistence, and mastery of complex skills.”
But those who find they love it “learn a lot about themselves,” Waszczak says. “Undergraduate research provides students with a potentially life-changing opportunity.”
Here are two recent undergraduate explorers who, backed by a provost-office grant, made some fruitful discoveries about a life sciences issue. And reinvigorated their dreams for the future.
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Senior |
Robin Ortiz’s friends know that she’s passionate about studying cancer, Parkinson’s, and other devastating diseases. Also that she volunteers weekly at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, hospice, to comfort the dying with a kind word and offers of practical support.
Some people tell her that one day she’ll have to pare back her interests and focus either on research or on a humanistic approach to medicine. Ortiz says no, she’s sticking with both—her neuroscience study only furthers her fascination with the mind-body connection and the critical role of compassion in medicine.
She has seen firsthand the value of her combined passions. A few years ago, while studying leukemia for an early research project at Northeastern, Ortiz talked about her work with some old friends at a New Year’s Eve party back home in New Jersey.
A month later, one of them called to say he’d been diagnosed with leukemia. Over the next year, Ortiz and the twenty-three-year-old man became close as he struggled first with chemotherapy, then with the imminence of his death.
“Oh, my God, he was such an inspiration to me,” says Ortiz of her friend Matthew Hayduk, who died in 2006.
Ortiz’s knowledge of leukemia research and her compassionate nature “were the reasons he found support in me,” she says. “He knew I was comfortable with patients who were terminally ill and with the disease itself.”
Today, for her provost grant–funded work, Ortiz is giving rats intranasal doses of a potent growth factor called GDNF (glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor) to see if it increases the size and density of midbrain dopaminergic neurons, cells that die during the development of Parkinson’s disease. (The nasal route was chosen because it allows substances to pass directly into the brain, bypassing the blood-brain barrier.) She’s also testing a “nanocarrier” drug-delivery system.
“If intranasal GDNF proves to be neuroprotective in rats, we hope to design a safe, effective intranasal formulation for treatment for Parkinson’s disease,” explains faculty sponsor Barbara Waszczak.
“Robin’s research is an essential step in the preclinical testing of this strategy,” Waszczak says.
During her five years at Northeastern, Ortiz has undertaken a number of research projects, including one at Harvard Medical School. For another, she studied colon-cancer cells alongside assistant pharmaceutical-sciences professor Robert Campbell, which paralleled work in chemotherapy she was doing at the same time at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The Parkinson’s project has been particularly valuable to her, she says, because it combines a number of her interests: pharmacology, medicine, neuroscience, animal surgery, and immunology. It’s serious, substantial work for someone just twenty-one years old.
“A lot of people say that to me,” says Ortiz, laughing. “It’s funny—one of my friends and I joke that we feel like we’re ninety.”
She says the variety of her research experience has in itself been irreplaceable. “I started in an organic chemistry lab and hated it,” she remembers. But the bad fit only prompted her to ferret out other opportunities.
“That’s the best way to figure out what you want to do,” she says. “From there, it was a snowball effect.”
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Sixth-year student; scheduled to graduate in May with a doctorate in physical therapy |
When Stacey Donahue entered Northeastern, she was planning on becoming a pediatric surgeon. But after her doctors discovered she had a very mild form of epilepsy, she started taking a medication that led to a common side effect—trembling hands.
She didn’t get discouraged. She started thinking about alternative medical careers, which got her considering the tangible rewards of helping to rehabilitate injured people. Now she’s in the last months of a six-year doctoral program in physical therapy.
Currently, Donahue says, most university-level programs in physical therapy are doctoral programs, producing graduates who have a wider range of skills than physical therapists of years past. Today’s physical therapists have the knowledge and background to diagnose more illnesses, order more tests, and make more referrals for more health issues.
Look, for instance, at the area of Donahue’s research: cardiology. Donahue and three other physical-therapy students—Melissa Gershenson, Sara Drouin, and Courtney Constantine—studied mitral valve prolapse, a common condition in which a heart valve doesn’t close completely.
Specifically, they looked at whether this condition is linked to anxiety in college students and whether it has an effect on students’ lives, physically or otherwise. The team was also able to develop an equation that physicians can use to determine if a patient who presents certain symptoms, such as dizziness, has a mitral valve prolapse.
“It was something we stumbled across when we were analyzing our data,” says Donahue, whose provost-office grant enabled the purchase of a high-tech heart monitor. “From [looking at] blood pressure, heart rate, and [the patient’s] demographics, you can figure it out.”
Her project taught her a lot, Donahue says: “Cardiac rehabilitation, especially the research I did, keeps you in the loop of newer ways to practice.” And research “gets you thinking beyond the classroom. It really helps you narrow down the things you’re interested in and what you’d like to do after school.”
She found the provost’s office stayed invested in her work. “They weren’t just congratulating us on the grant,” she says. “They really were interested.” She was similarly impressed by the way Northeastern encourages students to explore every avenue: “If you see something that makes you want to do more research, the school is strongly supportive.”
In addition to her research, Donahue has had co-ops with several physical-therapy offices, leading to a job offer from one. She’s also worked at Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital with victims of stroke and spinal-cord injuries.
“It was really cool to see people advance from such impairments to doing things that meet their goals,” she says. “To see someone completely debilitated, not even able to move a toe, then to see them walking is just amazing to me. I want to be part of that.”
Donahue hopes someday to teach at the collegiate level while working part-time at a clinic. It would be a good pairing. Physical-therapy students and patients alike could benefit from following her exuberantly can-do example.
Elaine McArdle is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the Fall issue, she examined the experiences of students who travel abroad for study or work.