Lauren Miller planned to teach high school biology as well as health and nutrition. She knew that having hands-on research experience would boost her resume. So the 21-year-old secondary education major at Western Michigan University (WMU) signed up to work in a biology laboratory. To be honest, Miller says, she was not looking forward to it.

“I came in thinking research was antisocial and I’d be sitting at a lab table by myself,” she says. She expected a long, lonely 10 weeks.

But Miller got caught up in her summer research project, part of the university’s HHMI-funded program to give science teachers-in-training, also called preservice teachers, some real-life research experience. Often working alongside her advisor, WMU biologist Chris Pearl, she prepared and stained slices of paraffin-embedded mouse testes to measure levels of a key estrogen-producing enzyme in normal and obese mice. And she learned a lot more.

Illustration: Sanna Mander