Science internships reward students and society

Nate Peterson is one of many SMU undergraduates who performed research last summer.
He's shown working with Dr. Ray Faber.

Whether our undergraduate students were working at Mayo, the Fermilab, Gundersen, or the Mississippi River, important learning occurred in summer internships that enabled Saint Mary’s students to use their knowledge to contribute to the solution of significant regional and national problems.

Timothy McDonald, a double major in chemistry and engineering physics, and Thomas Briese, a biochemistry major, both worked with Father Paul Nienaber, SJ, Ph.D., chair of SMU's Physics Department, as part of the MicroBooNE neutrino experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Funding for these students was provided by a Research at Undergraduate Institutions grant from the National Science Foundation.

Luke Baertlein, a biophysics major, worked at the Mayo Clinic in the Department of Health Sciences Research - Epidemiology Division. Jennifer Koezly, a double major in chemistry and engineering physics, worked in the Lando/NSF Summer Research Program in the chemical sciences at the University of Minnesota. Brian Kasel, a biophysics major, was in the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center Summer Fellowship Program.

A different type of internship found Nate Peterson, an environmental biology major (and a member of the Saint Mary’s hockey team), participating in projects that included: a study of the smooth soft shell turtle; research on the trout streams of southeastern Minnesota with a graduate student at the U of M; working with Dr. Phil Cochran ’77 to collect planktivorous fishes in Square Lake, Minnesota; assisting Dr. Ray Faber to band gull chicks in their nests in Green Bay of Lake Michigan; collection of brook lampreys in Iowa; and processing of nuisance rattlesnakes from the Winona area.

At the Research Laboratory at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, Biology major Lukas Wallerich studied aspects of Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. He collected deer ticks in Southeast Minnesota and analyzed them for the prevalence of pathogens. Paige Jensen worked with La Crosse County’s Vector Control Department, studying mosquitoes known to transmit La Crosse encephalitis and West Nile diseases. She trapped mosquitoes and worked on mosquito eradication and public education about mosquito habitat. Chris Engesser, a computer science student, worked with Dr. Mingrui Zhang to understand, run, and test computational gene clustering algorithms on genetic microarray lung cancer data provided by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Stephanie Valentine, a senior computer science major, did research with Dr. Tracy Hammond of Texas A&M University, funded by the CDC/CRA-W Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU).