Michael Summers (second from left) huddles for an impromptu discussion
with students Brian Turner, Chelsea Stalling and Ryan Turner.
Photo: Mark Lee
"We were wowed by everything...We started in the lab right away."
Ryan Turner, Brian's lab mate and twin brother, says they were both drawn to UMBC by the lab and the chance to do research. Both were set to attend Duke—Summers says they'd already signed their housing forms—when UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski III brought them through the HHMI lab.
"We were wowed by everything," remembers Ryan. "We started in the lab right away."
Danielle Smith, another senior, first heard Summers speak in a Chemistry 101 lecture. "He was showing protein structures that had been solved. I didn't even know you could do that kind of thing," says Smith. "The next semester I spoke with him about it, and he invited me to join the lab."
Ryan Turner and Smith, who will both attend combined-degree programs, were co-first authors on a 1998 letter in Nature Structural Biology. They solved the three-dimensional structure of a protein that regulates metal toxicity in the yeast strain Candida glabrata.
"We were the first undergraduates to be first authors on a paper from the lab," says Ryan Turner. "We spent about a year and a half to two years on [the project]."
("One thing they left out," confides Brian Turner, "is that apparently this project had been passed down from graduate student to graduate student because no one could finish it.")
Summers introduces students gradually to lab life, providing relevant readings, then a tour through the lab, followed by immersion in the lab, preferably when classes are not in session. It doesn't matter if students have no knowledge of organic chemistry or have never seen a spectrometer. They learn quickly.
"We're expected to perform and do the work," says Stalling. "The work we do is the quality of work that professionals do. To me that's amazing, but a lot of it is due to Dr. Summers. He recognizes that age isn't limiting in science—it's not like you have to be a certain age or possess a certain degree in order to produce something meaningful or have a creative idea."
Summers' philosophy is to work hard and play hard. Groups from the lab go skiing and mountain biking and celebrate one another's birthdays. Practical jokes are not uncommon. The lab feels like a large family.
"Dr. Summers has told us that he wants us to feel like the lab is our second home, and to stop by during the day and say hi," says Ryan Turner.
