2013 Choose Development!
Report
By Marsha E. Lucas
Eleven undergraduate
students recently completed their first summer of
research with the Society for Developmental
Biology's
Choose Development! program. Funded by the
National Science Foundation, Choose Development!
aims to increase the diversity of undergraduate
students entering doctoral programs in fields
related to developmental biology. SDB Fellows
conducted research in the labs of SDB members who
served as their academic mentors. They were also
paired with a senior graduate student or postdoc who
served as their lab mentor. The list of Fellows
along with their academic and lab mentors can be
found
here.
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Brittany Prioleau (left) with Billie Swalla
collecting on MBL dock. |
A
fruitful
collaboration between the
Marine Biological
Laboratory (MBL) Embryology Course and Choose
Development! was fostered this summer thanks to
course directors,
Richard Behringer and
Alejandro
Sánchez Alvarado. Brittany Prioleau from
Heather
Evans-Anderson's lab at Winthrop University and
Christopher Pineda from
Laura Burrus' lab at San
Francisco State University were each able to spend
one week at the MBL Embryology Course. This was a
great opportunity for them to meet with an
international group of scientists and learn new
techniques and organisms for studying development.
The fellows were mentored by graduate students
and/or postdocs who were students of the course, who
in turn benefited from this experience of serving as
a mentor to an undergrad.
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Chris Pineda (right) with Lee Niswander
in the Embryology Lab at MBL. |
In July, three teams
of fellows and mentors from the northeast region met
at New York University in order for the students to
connect with one another. The fellows assembled were Chibuzo Anojulu from
Celeste Nelson's lab at
Princeton, Davys Lopez from
Jeremy Nance's lab at
NYU, and Dylan Faltine-Gonzalez from
Alexandra
Joyner's lab at Sloan-Kettering. SDB President
Martin Chalfie, Choose Development! program co-PI
Ida Chow, and Coordinator Karen Bennett also
participated in this gathering. See team photos
here.
Due to graduation,
there will be openings for new Choose Development!
Fellows next summer. Applications will be available
on the
Choose Development! site by December 1.
Review of applications will begin in January. The
submission deadline is February 28, 2013.
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