Admissions

Lake Forest, Ill. – Twelve Lake Forest College students are conducting research this summer in a variety of areas, including pharmacology, neurology, cell and molecular biology, chemistry, and microbiology, at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (RFUMS). The collaboration offers exclusively the opportunity for Lake Forest students to work with faculty and students at RFUMS labs.

Associate Professor of Biology Shubhik DebBurman says that while summer research programs are by no means unique at major universities, the fact that RFUMS has partnered with a single liberal arts college is distinct: “I do not know of another instance where a formal summer research program was developed specifically between one medical school and one national liberal arts college.”

The program will allow more Lake Forest students to engage in one-on-one research with professors. In the past, summer research opportunities were mostly limited to availability in the College’s labs. But, this program should allow the number of new students conducting summer research in biomedicine to nearly double. And, DebBurman believes that provides Lake Forest students with the edge they need to succeed once they graduate.

“Undergraduate research,” DebBurman says, “ is well documented in the science education literature as one of the most important career developmental and pedagogical facets of a 21st-century undergraduate curriculum. Research not only provides our students firsthand exposure to questions being asked at the frontier of knowledge, it also strengthens and extends the classroom education to the real world in the most rigorous and intellectual of ways.”

The inaugural class of summer researchers includes 12 Lake Forest College undergraduates majoring in biology, chemistry, and psychology, including two first-year students. These students are researching topics that vary from Schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, spinal muscular atrophy, RNA biochemistry, protein synthesis, neuroanatomical networks, and the biology of addiction.

“The [Lake Forest College students] are extremely motivated and fast learners,” says the program’s founder professor of pharmacology at Rosalind Franklin Kuei Y. Tseng. “Many of them are as motivated as our graduate students and this is the type of human power we all need to maintain a competitive research program.”

Tseng sees the program developing into a long-term project, with students working in the labs during the academic year to earn internship credits. Students will learn from graduate students and their professors how to conduct experiments, collect the results and perform data analyses, with in vivo and in vitro electrophysiology recordings, for example. They will also take part in courses and seminars/journal clubs during the summer.

The full list of student researchers, their faculty mentors and their research topics:

Current summer RFUMS-LFC students:
Pascal Accoh '12 (Mentor: Dr. Heinz Steiner, Cell & Molecular Pharmacology)
Derek Atchley '10 (Dr. Amiel Rosenkranz, Cell & Molecular Pharmacology)
Daryn Cass '10 (Dr. Kuei Y.Tseng, Cell & Molecular Pharmacology)
Paige Keasler '10 (Dr. Michele Hastings, Cell Biology & Anatomy)
Bobby Hodges '11 (Dr. Michela Marinelli, Cell & Molecular Pharmacology)
Stephanie Feld '11 ( Dr. Michela Marinelli, Cell & Molecular Pharmacology)
David Konefal '11 (Dr. William Frost, Cell Biology & Anatomy)
Ashleigh Porter '11 (Dr. Carl Correll, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology)
Natalie Simak '11 (Dr. Kuei Y. Tseng, Cell & Molecular Pharmacology
Brittany Stern '11 (Dr. Dominik Duelli, Pathology)
Shannon Ver Woert '11 (Dr. Carl White, Physiology & Biophysics)
Shabana Yusufishaq '12 (Dr. Hongkyun Kim, Cell Biology & Anatomy).

Lake Forest College is a national liberal arts institution located 30 miles north of downtown Chicago. The College has 1,400 students representing 45 states and 69 countries.

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Will Pittinos '06
847-735-6177
pittinos@lakeforest.edu