HWI’s summer program is the best experience for students who are pursuing a science-related career. According to Dr. Jane F. Griffin, principal research scientist and summer intern program coordinator, “Being an active part of a research group for 10 weeks or more enables the student to find out if research is her or his passion.  Internships with significant learning opportunities are an invaluable way to fit your interests to a career path.” The students are immersed in science and by the end truly understand different approaches to research. HWI’s summer program is designed to involve students in scientific projects and expose them to real-life lab procedures and state-of-the-art equipment. The students study molecular biology, biochemistry, crystal growth, and X-ray diffraction to assist scientists with their research. Following the program, the students present what they have learned from the program in front of their mentors and peers. Students in the 2009 internship are:

Summer Students:

Anny Caceres and Karen DeWispelaere, both honors students from the University of Buffalo, are working with Dr. Debashis Ghosh. Caceres, a returning summer intern, is a McNair Scholar and will be working on purifying and crystallizing human CytochromeP450 Reductase (hCPR) in conjunction with CytochromeP450 Aromatase. DeWispelaere is working on an Interphotoreceptor Retinoid-Binding Protein (IRBP) related project. The McNair Scholar program was named in honor of Ronald E. McNair, a scientist and payload specialist who died in the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle “Challenger.” This program was designed to encourage low income, first-generation college students and students from groups under-represented in graduate education, to pursue advanced study.

Jane Caty, a biology student at Cornell, is working with Dr. Roopa Thapar to express and purify two proteins that play important roles in RNA-mediated gene expression.  She will help initiate structural analysis on these proteins using both NMR and X-ray crystallography.

Deanna Driscoll, a student in pharmacology at the University of Buffalo, and Erin Crawford a Biology student at the State University of New York at Binghamton, have joined Dr. DeTitta and Liz Kish in their work in designing a new approach to crystallization. As such, they will be preparing hundreds of new crystallization cocktails, and measuring their physical properties such as surface tension, density, viscosity, and vapor pressure lowering.

David Dziak, a student in Bioinformatics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is working with Dr. William L. Duax. Dziak is writing computer programs that analyze biological data magnitudes of times faster than can be done by hand.  He is currently creating a webpage that displays codon bias statistics for use in researching the evolution of the codes for amino acids.

Daniel Dykstra and Adam Ferin are working is Dr. Michael Malkowski’s research group. Dykstra, a student from SUNY Fredonia, is working on projects related to understanding the differences in substrate specificities exhibited by COX-1 and COX-2. Ferin, a chemistry student at Case Western Reserve University, is working with is Dr. Mary Rosenblum preparing and characterizing chemical solutions utilized in the high-throughput crystallization laboratory to identify initial conditions to crystallize membrane proteins.

Leah Herzog, a student at Washington & Jefferson, is working with Dr. Timothy Umland on two projects this summer. She will be optimizing initial crystallization leads on a set of transcription factor-DNA complexes that regulate human development. This project has the goal of understanding how specific developmental genes are turned on or off in the proper temporal and spatial order. She also will participate in a project to identify virus-host protein-protein interaction complexes critical for viral replication.

Colleen Judge, a student at Princeton, is working with Dr. Daniel Gewirth doing experiments to explore functional differences between different members of the hsp90 chaperone family.  Hsp90s are molecular chaperones that are required for the maturation and activity of many cellular proteins.  Chemical inhibitors of hsp90s are promising new leads for treatment of a variety of pathologies, including cancer, heart disease, infection, and aging.

Emily Li and Kelsey Taylor are working with Dr. Andy Gulick. Li, a human biology student at Brown University, will be working on a family of enzymes that bacteria use to produce secondary metabolites, compounds that bacteria use to communicate and that are responsible in some cases for the virulence of pathogenic bacteria. Emily’s project will be to investigate many different proteins within this family to enable the prediction of the protein activity. Taylor, a junior at Connecticut College, will be working on firefly luciferase, an enzyme that is closely related to the bacterial enzymes being studied by Gulick’s group. Kelsey is currently working with Gulick’s collaborator, Dr. Bruce Branchini, on variants of this enzyme to understand the function and the relationship between protein structure and the color of light that is produced.

Kelly Lyons, a student from Holy Cross College, is working Dr. Barnali Chaudhuri. She will concentrate on cloning bacterial chromosome segregation proteins and purifying these proteins for crystallization.

Brittany Montross, a student from the University at Buffalo, will be working with Dr. Hongliang Xu on a project that determines the structure of microcrystals from x-ray diffraction data. The goal of this project is to develop powder diffraction biocrystallography as a useful and practical tool for determining the structures of potential pharmaceuticals and intermediates in their synthesis even when only microcrystals of these substances can be obtained. She will test new mathematical algorithms, analyze testing results and optimize computational procedure.   

Jessica Nowak and Elizabeth Stewart are working in Dr. Vivian Cody’s lab. Nowak, a student at Canisius College, is working on the characterization (expression, purification, crystallization) of a new protein in the folate metabolic pathway as part of Cody’s AIDS-related drug design project. Stewart, a student from Wake Forest University is working on the purification and crystallization of mutants of the Pneumocystis carinii dihydrofolate reductase, the target enzyme in their AIDS-related drug design project.

Elliot Penna, of Lehigh University, is working in the Joseph Luft Eddie Snell laboratory conducting investigations related to macromolecular crystallization.  His efforts will further research underway at HWI to understand macromolecular crystallization at a fundamental level, while simultaneously applying existing high-throughput technologies that were developed at HWI, to structurally uncharacterized macromolecules.

Jackie Sikora, a student at Allegheny College, is working with Dr. Wayne Schultz on a project geared toward understanding how animal viruses mutate to infect humans. Her specific project is to produce complexes of human and virus proteins that occur during infections with SARS and influenza viruses. The structures of these complexes will help us to understand how viruses infect cells and what mutations are necessary to establish infections in new species.

Special Thanks

Cutbacks in funding from foundations that have traditionally funded the Summer Intern Program have caused this year’s intern class to shrink in size. Due to the current national economic issues, we are especially grateful to First Niagara, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of WNY and Josephine Goodyear Foundation for their continued support in a program designed to further the education and learning process of today’s young adults.

We also would like to thank almost a dozen families, whose children previously participated in the Summer Intern Program, for graciously donating $3,550 to help provide other students with the same opportunities that their own children were afforded.

We want to thank HWI’s Principal Research Scientist Dr. George DeTitta and Adele DeTitta, for their generous $4,000 gift as well as HWI board member Mr. and Mrs. Charles Balbach, who donated $2,500 toward the program.

The First Niagara Foundation has donated $25,000, through their Mentoring Matters program, for the HWI summer Program. The foundation has made a commitment to fund local communities mentoring programs. They make decisions regionally to ensure that the needs of local communities are met through charitable donations.

The Josephine Goodyear Foundation has donated $10,000 to the HWI Research Intern Summer Program. The foundation, which offers grants to non-profit organizations helping low-income women and children in Western New York, encourages collaboration between organizations. The Josephine Goodyear Foundation has given support to events, organizations, and educational and scholarship programs in the Greater Buffalo area.