Mid-SURE Provides Opportunity for Undergraduates to Display Their Summer Research
By Chuck Carlson
Natasha Borges Marti has learned a lot, especially when it comes to perseverance.
The University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez student, a self-proclaimed dog lover who one day hopes to become a veterinarian, had applied to join Michigan State University’s Biomedical Research for University Students in Health Sciences (BRUSH) Summer Research program last year and had been declined.
“I knew I needed to do more research, so I spent the year at college really working on my research skills,” she said. “I applied again this year and got in.”
And the 11-week program has been everything she had imagined.
“Oh my God,” she said. “The experience.”
She demonstrated what she’d learned on July 24 at the 14th annual Mid-Michigan Symposium for Undergraduate Research Experiences (Mid-SURE), which featured the research work of summer undergraduate students from across the region at MSU’s STEM Teaching and Learning Facility.
The Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology was represented by students who participated in the BRUSH and the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF).
For Marti, whose poster focused on the process by which gut E. Coli become resistant to some antibiotics, it was an opportunity to delve into the kind of research she had not worked with before.
“I’ve been to places I’ve never been before, and I’ve worked with materials I’ve never worked with,” said Marti, whose mentor is Dr. Linda Mansfield. “And I’ve become so much more organized. I wake up early and I try not to leave everything to the last minute. And the people have been great. It’s been an experience and an opportunity.”
Another BRUSH participant, Helagenet Hailu (whose mentor is Dr. Jamie Bernard), is a computational biology major at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. She was looking for a summer research project opportunity as well and after considering several, decided on MSU’s. Her poster focused on drug resistance in obesity-related breast cancer.
“This has been the perfect opportunity for me, and it was a new experience to work with data and numbers,” she said, though she admitted when she saw the chemical studies background of many of the students, she wasn’t sure she was in the right place.
“I felt imposter syndrome,” she said with a smile. “I wondered if I really belonged here. But as I presented my research, I felt I belonged. I’ve definitely learned a lot and grown a lot.”
Sophia Caron (whose mentor is Dr. Brian Johnson) displayed and explained her poster on studying thyroid hormones to visitors, but she had not participated in either BRUSH or SURF. For the second straight year, though, she took part in Mid-SURE as an MSU undergraduate majoring in human biology who is considering a Ph.D. in PhmTox.
“This is just such a great summer research opportunity,” she said, taking the experience from presenting last year and gaining a new outlook this year.
“I could feel the gap close between what I knew last year and this year,” she said. “Last year, I mostly read from a script, and this year, it’s less of a script. It’s just experience.”