Forty years ago, when Fred Byron was an undergraduate, he was thrilled to learn that his university had acquired one of those newfangled digital computers. The young scholar, deeply interested in math and physics, yearned to get his hands on this state-of-the-art machine. But, his desire ran smack into a culture that frowned on lowly undergraduates who aspired to use high-powered research equipment.
The university laboratory was regarded in those days as an inner sanctum, off limits to any young upstart who hadn’t even earned a Bachelor’s degree. Hands-on laboratory experience, except in the most menial capacities, simply was not part of undergraduate education back then. “In my day, people were a bit more formal about undergraduate and graduate than they are today,” Byron recalls. “All you could you could do was be a bottle washer. Nowadays the kids are doing real stuff. Esoteric equipment of every size, shape, and variety is being used by undergraduates.”
Byron should know. As Vice Chancellor for Research at UMass Amherst, he presides over a multi-million dollar array of research programs in which hundreds of undergrads work side by side with graduate students and internationally acclaimed professors. “It is a wonderful thing for students to get to understand what really happens in the life of a working electrical engineer or biochemist,” Byron says. “This enriches the educational experience of our best students. There’s something about hands-on. I never met one kid who didn’t think of it as just a fabulous opportunity. It broadens a student’s horizons.”
Linda Slakey seconds Byron’s view. Formerly chair of the biochemistry and molecular biology department, now Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Slakey regards undergraduate involvement in research as an essential feature of the UMass learning environment. “We aren’t just a school and we aren’t just a research institution,” she says. “The classic justification for the existence of universities is that we do research and teaching in the same place. The whole point is that we integrate the two. And that plays itself out for undergraduates in encouraging them to participate in research.”
Whether it’s learning “micro-dissection” techniques to study a fruit fly’s nervous system, using sophisticated observatory equipment to record a comet’s collision with the planet Jupiter, or joining a marine biology field trip to Puerto Rico, direct involvement in scientific research plays a crucial role in educating some of the university’s best students. “It allows them to become excited about what they do,” says Honors Program director Linda Nolan, “and also to find out whether they enjoy being in science. You really don’t know about any profession unless you’re in there doing it.”
A tropical disease researcher in the environmental health sciences department, Nolan has enjoyed watching undergraduates blossom in numerous campus research labs, including her own. “They learn something about themselves,” she says. “When you go nto a lab and start working, it enhances your ability to learn the textbook stuff, to sit in the classes and take the notes. It really makes it come to life. The earlier the student gets engaged in laboratory activity, the better it is.”
Nolan, who earned her master’s and doctorate at UMass, did her undergraduate work at Penn State, where laboratory experience was a required part of her curriculum. Remembering the important role that research experience played in her own education, she feels a special obligation to promote similar experience for today’s undergraduates. For the past three years, the Honors Program that she directs has sponsored an annual conference at which students from four UMass campuses – Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, and Lowell – gather to compare notes and share their research projects with fellow scholars. At the 1997 conference, held last April in Amherst, presentations by more than 200 students shared the floor with speeches of celebration and encouragement from UMass Amherst Chancellor David Scott and other university officials, and with sessions on such nuts-and-bolts topics as career planning and graduate school admissions.
From astronomy to Zoology: direct involvement in scientific research plays a crucial role in educating some of the University's best students
“If you are planning to go to graduate school,” notes Vice Chancellor Byron, “there’s no question that undergraduate research experience gives you a tremendous leg up. Admissions committees are looking for kids who have had that experience already, who are ready to go when they come to graduate school, who don’t have as much of a learning curve.”
Psychology professor Katherine Fite, director of the university’s Neuroscience and Behavior Program, agrees with Byron that a track record as an undergraduate researcher is a valuable credential for any student with an eye on an advanced degree. “It’s very helpful to them when they’re applying to graduate school or medical school,” Fite says.
Like Honors Program director Nolan, Fite has vivid memories of her own introduction to college-level scientific research. “I got my start in research as an undergraduate at Florida State,” she says. “If I had not had that opportunity, I might never have gone to graduate school.” She delights in watching a new generation of scientists go through the same process of intellectual discovery. “It’s exciting for me, because in a sense I’m always reliving the experience that I had as an undergraduate, and I’m constantly being amazed by the insights and the enthusiasm and the thoughtfulness that many of these students bring to their research.”
One important aspect of laboratory research, Fite adds, is the experience of being initiated into a scientific fellowship. “Science is a social activity,” she says. “It’s something that you learn as you would learn a sport or a musical instrument. Undergraduate researchers are working both with faculty and with graduate students, so they’re part of a community of researchers and scholars at different levels of experience, different levels of seniority. It’s a team that is built on this wonderful mix of initial learners, more advanced learners, and professionals.”
In some cases, Fite says, undergraduates in the laboratory simply take lessons from senior members of the research team, learning established procedures and practicing time-tested techniques. On other occasions, they may be asked to join in an effort to solve new problems and break new ground. “Sometimes there’s a lot of trial and error involved in getting a particular technique to work,” she explains. “That’s educational for them as well. I had a student a number of years ago who has since become a surgeon. He reconstructs hands. A marvelous student who was very hardworking and conscientious. He kept saying to me, ‘What should I do next?’ I said, ‘Well, you have to think about that. It’s your project and you’re fully qualified to think about where it will go.’ And that was really surprising to him, because in all of the labs that he’d been in for courses, everything was worked out to the nth degree. That’s the experience that most students have had in labs. So when they come into a research lab, they don’t necessarily know what they’re going to do next. It’s not done according to a cookbook. There are five alternatives. How do you decide? Well, maybe you’ll do all five to see which will lead you to the next stage. Students get into the dynamic process of science. That’s a real learning experience of a kind that they haven’t had before.”
The accumulated lessons that students learn day after day in their research labs add up to two big lessons, Fite says. “They learn that the process of doing science is an enormous amount of hard work, and an enormous amount of fun.”
The students who embrace the hard work and the sheer fun of UMass research are an extraordinarily diverse bunch, with interests ranging from astronomy to zoology. The handful of undergraduate researchers profiled here are representative only in the sense that their energy, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to excellence reflect the quality of the work that their fellow students are doing all across campus. But each of them comes to his or her research with a unique set of interests and a distinct personal style. These are a few select flashes of brilliance from a dazzling light show, a small sampling of strong voices from a large, talented chorus.
Medicinal Mushrooms
Growing up in Czechoslovakia, biology major Alenka Lovy frequently joined in the mushroom-gathering outings that are something of a national craze in her native country. “There was major competition out in the woods,” she recalls with a smile. “You had to get up at 4:00 in the morning to hunt them.”
Back then, she knew mushrooms simply as a traditional food and the focus of an enjoyable socialactivity. Only years later, after her family had fled then-communist Czechoslovakia for a new life in the United States, did she begin seriously studying the biology of these peculiar plants and conducting research on their medicinal properties. The first thing to understand, Lovy says, is that the familiar cap-on-a-stem is just one small part of the organism that scientists know as a mushroom. “The actual structure is this vast underground network of hair-like structures in the soil. It can go for 40 square miles. That’s the mushroom. When it wants to reproduce, it puts up what we call a mushroom and that sends out spores. Nobody understands what makes them pop up. You’ll find them in one spot maybe for five years, and then it’ll change on you and you just have to search the woods for them.”
As it happens, Lovy’s interest in a mushroom-related research project was born while she was searching the woods for rare plants two years ago, during the summer between her sophomore and junior years. She had a job in Washington State, helping to identify endangered plants in areas threatened by timber industry clear-cutting. “I found this incredible mushroom in a mossy area by a waterfall,” she recalls. “It looked like magic. It was bright orange-red, about as big as a dinner plate, and it just glowed. It was shiny as if it had been shellacked.” Searching through reference books for information on similar mushrooms, she came across one that had long been prized in traditional Chinese medicine. That was the inspiration for her subsequent research. “I got really interested in seeing if any other mushrooms had healing qualities.”
With environmental health scientist Linda Nolan as her faculty advisor, Lovy developed a research project that tests 17 New England mushroom species for their ability to inhibit two types of disease organisms – cancer cells and parasites that cause malaria. For this project, she had to learn how to propagate mushrooms, how to prepare and purify extracts, and how to measure the toxic effects of these extracts. Although she was working with edible, non-poisonous mushrooms, she found several that demonstrated strong toxic effects against destructive cells. Five of her 17 extracts showed significant ability to inhibit the growth of cancer cells, and one was particularly potent against malaria parasites. “There was one that showed 98 percent inhibition of the parasite,” Lovy says. “I definitely want to publish that, to get that out there so people test these things further.”
She knows that health research and drug development are extremely long, involved processes, and that her mushroom study amounts only to preliminary research on treatments that may prove useful at some point in the future. Nevertheless, she is excited enough about the results of her lab experience that she looks forward to a career in medicinal agriculture, cultivating plants with a variety of healing properties. As a next step toward that goal, she is moving back to the Northwest where her mushroom project began. With her UMass biology degree in hand, she is heading for Washington State for graduate study in biochemistry.
Infrared-sensitive
Microchips
When Christopher LeBlanc and Danny Cho collected their engineering degrees last May, they both had jobs in their field waiting for them. LeBlanc had been hired by IBM to work in the computer giant’s microelectronics division in Burlington, Vermont. Cho was on his way to Lockheed & Martin Sanders in Nashua, New Hampshire, to design components for satellite communication systems. The two young engineers took to their new jobs skills that they had honed over the course of a year-long research project (in collaboration with a third engineering student, Min Lee) that employed some of the most sophisticated equipment in the electrical and computer engineering department.
Working under the direction of Professor Kei May Lau, the engineering students created a communication device built around an optical semiconductor, a gallium arsenide microchip. The project was an especially ambitious one because they fabricated the chip themselves. Like the more common microchip material silicon, gallium arsenide is a crystalline substance whose electronic properties make it useful for any number of technological applications. In particular, gallium arsenide’s sensitivity to infrared light makes it a desirable material in many optical devices. The device that LeBlanc and Cho constructed had the ability to detect a signal carried on an infrared beam and convert that signal into sound.
Their project drew on Cho’s knowledge of communication technology and LeBlanc’s experience with the fabrication and characterization (testing) of semiconductor chips. For the delicate work of building the chip, whose features were measured in microns (millionths of a meter) they used their department’s “clean room,” a chamber with a special filtration system that removes minute dust particles from the air. When students work in the clean room LeBlanc says, “We sort of merge electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry.”
After the painstaking process of designing and building their gallium arsenide semiconductor, they checked the chip for its desired characteristics using a piece of advanced lab equipment that LeBlanc had learned to operate in the course of previous work with Prof. Lau. Switching on the machine for a demonstration, LeBlanc explains, “What we do here is characterize the semiconductors that we grow down the hall in the clean room. We take a laser light source and we shine it on the semiconductor. We’re trying to determine if the semiconductor is showing the physical properties that we want. The computer controls this instrumentation panel. It scans that light onto the semiconductor, then the semiconductor emits energy and we collect that energy and run a computer simulation. The computer will eventually put out a graph like this.” He picks up a sheet of paper and points to a series of peaks that represent the activity of electrons on the gallium arsenide chip. By analyzing such a graph, an engineer can determine whether the semiconductor chip is functioning according to design.
Once the chip was fabricated and its electronic characteristics verified, it was ready to be combined with other components to create the finished device. Cho and LeBlanc set their creation on a laboratory tabletop and point out the details of its structure. “You have a layer of metal,” LeBlanc says, “then a semiconductor, then another layer of metal. The optical signal comes out here. It shines onto the device and that changes it into electrical signals. Then the circuitry that Danny built reconstructs that electrical signal back into sound. It’s amplified and then you can pump it through some speakers. It’s a very simple device.”
As simple as landing jobs with a couple of the world’s top technology firms.
Going with the
Polymer Flow
Polymers are everywhere in the modern world – from simple plastics that perform useful but trivial functions in our daily lives to seemingly miraculous materials with advanced uses in medicine, engineering, and other fields. And UMass researchers have won international attention for their pioneering work to push forward the frontiers of polymer science. When chemical engineering major Homero Endara transferred here from a school in his native Ecuador, he was eager to take a hand in some of this pacesetting polymer research. Last fall, at the start of his junior year, he became involved in the university’s rheology lab, working with polymer scientists Wolfgang Wendler and H. Henning Winter to study the distinctive properties that certain polymers take on as they make the transition between liquid and solid.
“Rheology is the science of flow and movement,” Endara explains. Polymer rheology is important because many of the materials polymer scientists study actually assume new properties under changing flow conditions. “That’s one of the main differences between polymers and other substances,” Endara says. “If you take water, independent of what kind of processes you have with the water, you know what properties it will have. But with polymers, if we subject the sample to some process, the intrinsic properties of the material will change.”
The particular substances Endara has been studying exhibit properties that could be useful in the manufacture of adhesives and other products, including portable CD players and vibration-dampening insoles to reduce the stress of walking for people with back problems. These properties manifest themselves, Endara says, under pressure and temperature conditions associated with the transformation from liquid to solid. Under these conditions, long molecular chains stop twisting around each other like strands of spaghetti writhing in a pot of boiling water, and instead arrange themselves into lattice structures. Endara’s research involves methodically deforming or shearing these lattices to study the resulting changes in polymer properties.
Imagine squeezing a dab of peanut butter between two round crackers by pressing the crackers together and twisting them in opposite directions. That is what Endara does with the polymer gel samples he tests – compressing them between the metal disks of a machine known as a plate and plate rheometer. A sensor inside the rheo-meter measures the response to each substance to precise quantities of compression and shearing. Then special computer software developed by UMass researchers runs the response data through a variety of simulations to explore the details of each polymer’s molecular structure.
For Endara, one of the most exciting aspects of this work is the opportunity to collaborate via the Internet with researchers who are doing similar work in other countries. For example, the rheology lab has been communicating with some European researchers who use X-ray techniques to study polymer structure, then transmit their results to UMass for analysis by the same powerful computer simulation software that Endara has been using in his work. “That is very interesting,” he says enthusiastically, “because we are working together from two different perspectives.
Shedding Light
on the Brain
Janice Cosentino already has a UMass bachelor’s degree in English. Now she’s working on another one in biochemistry. She enjoyed the study of literature, but she wants a career in scientific research.
Cosentino’s interest in science dates back to childhood. “My dad is an electrical engineer,” she says. “I used to watch a lot of Nova with my dad, Cosmos, all those science shows. I definitely want to work in a research lab in some capacity. My advisor suggested that if I thought I wanted to work in a lab, I should get lab experience.” Acting on that advice, Cosentino approached Neuroscience and Behavior Program director Katherine Fite, who offered her a supporting role in an extensive research project that aims to map the brain’s handling of visual input.
“I’m a visual neuroscientist,” Fite explains. “I’m interested in visual pathways – how information from the eyes gets into the brain, how it’s processed, how the brain is involved in many different aspects of visual perception.” Research on a subject as fundamental as vision obviously has a wide range of complications. One possible result of this project could be improved understanding of the brain chemistry involved in seasonal affective disorder, a malady thought to be associated with inadequate exposure to light during the winter months.
Cosentino’s laboratory responsibilities include preparing and studying tissue samples from laboratory rats. “We’re trying to find chemical pathways in the brain,” she says. “So we inject the animal with something that we can trace later on. Then we look at the brain and see exactly where it went.” In a collection of slides that she has helped to assemble, and in colorful blown-up images posted on the laboratory wall, sections of tissue highlighted by various chemical reactions reveal how an intricate network of nerve cells distributes visual data to several different areas of the brain.
Cosentino counts the experience she has gained in Fite’s laboratory as an invaluable supplement to her regular course work. “In this lab,” she says, “everybody helps each other out. There’s a lot of work. You don’t just do an experiment and it’s all nice and neat and you get the answer. You have to try different angles, talk to other people who have maybe done something similar. It’s a lot of trial and error. You learn to appreciate everything that goes on behind the little paragraph in the textbook telling how something was discovered.
“You go to class and you hear about people working in labs, but unless you do it you don’t really know what it’s like.”
