Student Summer Experience Archives - 2009
Superfund Research
Through ARRA funding, the SRP was able to fund research programs for twenty four students at nine universities in the summer of 2009. Summaries of their research are below.
- Aaron Wolfe is a senior at Colorado State University. He spent his summer conducting research at Advanced MicroLabs (AML) to assist in their efforts to develop an online device to monitor perchlorate remediation operations.
- Adam Mazzotti designed and ran a set of experiments that will simulate changing environmental conditions for sediments contaminated with arsenic and mercury.
- Danielle Lyons is a senior student at the University of Kentucky, and she investigated the influence of dietary flavonoids.
- Elani Fourie compared the uptake and toxicity of PCBs adsorbed to nanoparticles of aluminum oxide on human tissue to PCB alone.
- Erin Keim worked on how inorganic arsenic degrades a gene responsible for cellular regulation of salt.
- Fanny Priaulet is a junior at Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Ingénieurs en Art Chimiques Et Technologiques, in Toulouse, France majoring in chemical engineering. She has performed research on the response of cultured epithelial cells to TCDD to permit a better understanding of differences in sensitivity to TCDD within the human population.
- Jane Chen spent her summer at Dartmouth College SRP program learning basic lab techniques and maintenance procedures.
- Janelle Geddes identified the mechanisms relating PCB exposure to obesity.
- Katerina von Beroldingen is a senior at University of California, Santa Cruz. She researched the effects of radical oxygen generators (arsenic and other reagents) on human epidermal cells treated in a low oxygen environment with Dr. Robert Rice at the University of California-Davis Department of Environmental Toxicology.
- Katherine Ridenour is a recent graduate of University of California-Davis. Over the summer she researched experience exposing human embryonic kidney cells and mouse inner medullary collecting duct cells.
- Kevin M. Mwenda is a senior at Dartmouth College; his research experience involved the incorporation of biostatistics with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in performing a spatial statistical analysis of particle pollution and lung cancer incidences.
- Larissa Calancie received her Bachelors of Science from Cornell University in May 2009. She analyzed the effects of arsenic exposure on oxidative stress in Bangladesh with Dr. Mary Gamble in the Environmental Health Sciences Department at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
- Marissa Dzoiba examined the cellular mechanisms of arsenic uptake in a model organism, Fundulus heteroclius (killifish).
- Marshall Allin graduated from Colorado State University (CSU). He spent the summer prior to his graduation working at Advanced Mircrolabs, LLC, working to develop an online device capable of monitoring perchlorate remediation operations.
- Mathieu Menard established a data entry system for the baseline prenatal questionnaire and other study data collection forms
- Maya Sayarath coded and prepared the statistical analysis for understanding the geographic patterns of dietary metal exposure.
- Melanie Sayarath spent her summer gaining valuable first-time work experience by assisting the Biostatistics and Epidemiology office at Dartmouth College.
- Miriam Subbiah just graduated from Hanover High school in Hanover, NH. She worked on the collaborative aim to evaluate the reliability of multiple measures of metal exposure in mothers and mother-infant pairs during her summer research experience at Dartmouth College.
- Nandini Vijayakumar helped to develop two PCB metabolite biosensors for the presence of, and level of, exposure.
- Neha Ray helped build a biosensor for metabolites of PCBs by positioning a protein able to bind with the toxin with a fluorophore strategically located on the tip of an optical sensor.
- Nick Sinnott-Armstrong was a senior at Hanover High School in Hanover, NH. He worked on refining an implementation of Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
- Pritesh Kumar tested a hypothesis that ingestion of fish oil will prevent cardiovascular toxicity induced by PCBs.
- Sarah Flaim investigated the effects of PCBs on the blood brain barrier by looking at a protein that removes foreign compounds from the brain.
- Sharang Biswas is in his sophomore year in Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. He analyzed sample dilutions of various liquids using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).
- Tessa Peart studied the bioaccumulation and trophic transfer of mercury in estuaries.
- Tiffany Sanchez learned laboratory analysis techniques in arsenic research.
