Intern: Angel Batista

School: Frederick Douglas Academy

Grade Level: entering 10th

Hobbies: Computer games, hydroponic vegetable gardening

Internship Mentor: Sandy Harrington (lab manager)

Angel was from Frederick Douglas Academy, one of the partnering schools working with us on high school curriculum development. He worked with Sandy Harrington and Diane Ran Wang, and spent his time extracting DNA, running PCR and agarose gels and helping with seed organization.

Intern: Christa Hardy

School: Purdue

Year: Entering Senior

Major: Genetic Biology

PGRP Recruit

Hobbies: Scrapbooking, Quilting

Internship Mentor: Sandy Harrington, Lab manager

Christa worked on NIL clean up for the sd1 gene (plant height), which involved DNA harvest and extraction, primer design, PCR, agarose gel electrophoresis, Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, silver staining and analysis and interpretation of results.

Intern: Diane Wang

School Cornell University

Year: Entering Sophomore

Major: Animal Science

Hobbies: Ultimate Frisbee, hiking

Internship Mentor: Lingxia Huang

Diane worked on MITES - an NSF project studying diversity in wild rices (Oryza sp.), which involved, DNA extraction, PCR, and agarose gel electrophoresis as well as analysis and interpretation of results. As a result of her internship is considering changing to either Plant Biology or Biochemistry.

Both Christa and Diane participated in designing and creating the McCouch Rice Lab Banner for the 6th Annual CALS Summer Scoop.