City Honors junior earns slot at international science fair

Adapted from an article by Deidre Williams published in the Buffalo News on April 27, 2009.

Jimmitti Teysir is a "born scientist."

Her mother is a nurse, and her father works for a pharmaceutical company.

Her eyes light up when she talks about the evolution of the genetic code.

She gets animated, and her hands start gesturing, when she explains the characteristics of a super family of enzymes in layman's terms.

Jimmitti presented her work at the International Science and Engineering Fail held in Reno, Nev., on May 10 through 15, 2009.

The high school junior was the first City Honors student ever chosen to compete in the prestigious science, math and engineering competition, even though students from the school's science research program have been trying to get to the fair for almost 15 years, officials said.

"I was nervous.  I had the opportunity to represent the school, and I felt very grateful to go.  I wanted to do good," Jimmitti said.

Her presentation at the fair involved evidence that supports the existence of a subset of a genetic code in a species of soil bacteria that's millions of years old.  She examined its genome and showed how it uses a reduced subset of a standard genetic code.

"She is a born scientist.  She has a genuine inquisitive mind," said Dr. William Duax, a research scientist at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute on Ellicott Street.

HWI, as it is called, runs a research training program for 10 schools in the Buffalo area, including City Honors.  Students get to work one-on-one with trained scientists at HWI two days a week after school and all day Fridays in a lab setting.

Located in the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the institute has a team of more than 75 members who study the causes of disease at their fundamental molecular level, as well as potential therapies.

Students in the program, including Jimmitti, have been studying bioinformatics technology to analyze protein families and to learn how to interpret data.

"We did a computer analysis and learned to use databases online, and then from there developed programs to process the data," said Jimmitti, who has a freshman brother at City Honors and a 6-year-old sister.

Jimmitti thinks maybe she will go into medicine as a career, but one thing is for sure, her profession will use science, she said.  Her parents both have career involving medicine and science.

"I've always liked science and biology for that reason,," she said, adding that she does not see herself going into bioinformatics as a career.

"This is behind the scenes now.  I'll probably want a career in the medical field to use what they learn behind the scenes," said Jimmitti, the fourth student trained at HWI to compete in the international fair.  Previous HWI students include Gabriel Ortiz, who was a 1992 finalist, and Sankha Basu, who in 1999 was a semifinalist.  Michael Wong also competed in the competition when it was known as the Westinghouse Science Fair.

The International Science and Engineering Fair is the world's largest international precollege science competition exclusively for students in grades 9 through 12, said local research scientists.  About 1,600 students come from more than 50 countries to compete for $4 million in awards and scholarships.

"It's a great resource," Jimmitti said.  "The judges have high degrees of knowledge, so you are pretty much guaranteed good feedback."