Michael Summers
Photo: Mark Lee
|
Download
this story in Acrobat PDF format.
(requires Acrobat Reader) |
| Related Links: |
NPR interview on Minorities and Science 10/26/99. |
|
HHMI Research News Updates: |
|
If you'd like to receive email notification of breaking HHMI research news, please enter your email address and click the send button. |
|
|
HHMI Investigator Michael Summers Nurtures Minority Undergraduates
Brian Turner is a rising star. He has published three articles in the Journal of Molecular Biology during the past three years and was first author on the most recent, a 32-page review of the structural biology of HIV. The colorful figures he created grace the cover of the journal.
Turner isn't a Howard Hughes investigator, a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, or even an up-and-coming postdoctoral fellow. He's a senior biochemistry major who does research in Michael Summers' HHMI laboratory.
He's also African American. And so are many of the other undergraduates in the lab.
Summers' lab at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) is graduating nine seniors this year, seven of whom are African American. Five will enter M.D./Ph.D. programs, three will enter biomedical Ph.D. programs and one will seek an M.D. Six are Meyerhoff Scholars—recipients of a UMBC scholarship generally awarded to high-achieving minority students who will pursue graduate work in science, engineering, math or computer science.
"To be honest," says Chelsea Stalling, a senior biochemistry major who worked on research published last year in the journal Science, "it's unheard of for African American students to receive as many [graduate school] interviews as people in this lab have this year, and at many of the top schools."
Stalling will enter an M.D./Ph.D. program, although she hasn't decided which one. Like the others in her group, she has the envious task of choosing among such schools as Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Washington University, Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago.
During the graduate school interview process, seniors from the lab were surprised to learn that their reputations often preceded them, and were also somewhat pleased at the mystique surrounding Michael Summers' undergraduates.
"The other schools can't figure out how he does it," says Turner, another future M.D./Ph.D. "At Yale, they wanted to know if it was something in the water."
Reprinted from the June 1999 HHMI Bulletin,Vol. 12,
No.2, pp 16-19. To
subscribe...
