In 2003, we initiated a program that would encourage students from regional high schools to participate in our internships. School administrators were very supportive, and we remain particularly indebted to Aqueela Shakur at the Ithaca High School. As minority affairs coordinator, she aided us in our efforts to include under-represented minorities in our Internships program.

All of the interns participated in a friendly presentation competition during their final week. The event was held at the Boyce Thompson Institute for plant research on the Cornell campus and was developed as a venue for honing scientific presentation skills. Learn more about our interns and the work they performed below.

Intern: Elana Maccou

School: Groton High School

Elana's Final Presentation

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Hobbies: soccer and track

Internship Mentor: Anjali Iye

Elana's and Anjali's project focused on identifying a section of the rice genome that is responsible for this crop's resistance against bacterial blight. This disease can destroy up to 30% of the rice crops in Southeast Asia. For this project, Elana extracted DNA using a matrix mill, performed PCR reactions, page gel electrophoresis, and analyzed segregation of microsatellite-markers in large populations segregating for bacterial blight resistance.

Intern: Rebecca Fernandes

Ithaca High School

Final Presentation

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Hobbies: reading and snow boarding

Internship Mentor: Endang Septiningshi (Septi) and Megan Sweeney

Rebecca lives in Ithaca, but is originally from Raleigh, NC, and has also lived in Peru and Brazil. Rebecca's project was focused on the evaluation of agronomic traits such as seed color, grain weight, and plant height. Rebecca also performed PCR reactions, ran agarose and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and worked on data interpretation tasks.

Intern: Joshua Esnard

Ithaca High School

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Hobbies: Soccer, computers

Internship Mentor: Michael Thomson

Joshua's hometown is Castries, St Lucia. His project aimed to identify candidate genes responsible for flowering time in rice plants. For this project, Joshua used a publicly available rice genome sequence to design primers for amplifying genes and other DNA sequences. He then tested those primers in the lab using PCR and agarose gel electrophoresis.