This Research Program offers the following research opportunity: Marine Biology and Environmental Science. As a result of COVID-19, this experience is online. 

Dates: March 30th - June 3rd, 2021

Tuition: $2,000

Grade Level: Students must currently be in 10th - 12th grade

Schedule: 

• Tuesdays and Thursdays  (3:30pm – 4:50pm PST)
• Synchronous online teaching
• 4 hours of work required outside of online lecture

Marine Biology and Environmental Science

Exposure to chemically complex, polluted sediments and water during early development can be lethal to a variety of species. Contaminated sediments accumulate in food webs or directly affect heath of marine life. In this course, students will utilize California Purple Urchin (Strongylocentrotus  purpuratus) embryo and larval development to conduct toxicity testing in the sediments collected from the Tijuana River Estuary and perform ecological risk assessment. Besides learning how to maintain and culture animals in the lab and perform fertilization tests utilizing microscopy to assess embryo morphology, students will (virtually) tour the estuary, collect sediment and water samples. They will learn to deploy passive sampling devices (PSDs) and perform toxicity testing on developing urchin embryos. Upon collecting data and performing statistical analysis, students will correlate phenotypic changes observed among developing embryo populations with estuarine sediment, water and PSD chemistry data.  Students will showcase their work and share their research with fellow scientists, academic, government officials and life-science industry leaders during a formal seminar symposium at the conclusion of the course. 

This Research Program offers the following research opportunity: Aging and Protein Aggregation. As a result of COVID-19, this experience is online. 

Dates: January 5th - March 11th, 2021 

Tuition: $1,800

Grade Level: Students must currently be in 10th - 12th grade

Schedule: 

• Tuesdays and Thursdays (3:30pm – 4:50pm PST)
• Synchronous online teaching
• 4 hours of work required outside of online lecture

Aging and Protein Aggregation

Premature aging can induce physiological changes and lead to disease. Protein aggregation associated with aging disturbs the cellular environment and may contribute to onset and progression of age-related diseases. Students will explore protein aggregation process which could induce or facilitate the decline of cellular functions, and evaluate methods to counteract the damaging effects of the aggregated proteins. Students will learn to utilize the model organism roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, microscopy, fluorescent tagging, qRT-PCR and Western Blotting to quantify gene activity and protein expression during several stress conditions. Statistical methods and bioinformatics tools will be applied to mine the data to better understand the biology of aging. 

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This Research Program offers the following research opportunity: Fruit Fly Sex-Specific Gene Activity in the Brain During Stress. As a result of COVID-19, this experience is online. 

Dates: October 6th - December 10th, 2020 

Tuition: $1,800

Grade Level: Students must currently be in 10th - 12th grade

Schedule: 

• Tuesdays and Thursdays (5:00pm – 6:20pm PST)
• Synchronous online teaching
• 4 hours of work required outside of online lecture

Fruit Fly Sex-Specific Metabolic Gene Activity in the Brain During Stress

Our study aims to quantify metabolic brain gene activity of female and male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) under several stressful conditions, including toxicant exposure, heat, and hypoxia. Students will learn to culture and manage fruit flies during critical developmental stages, microdissect fly brains and extract RNA.  Brain gene expression will be quantified using qRT-PCR; statistical and bioinformatics data analyses will be focused on loci involved in metabolic pathways to better understand the sex-specific coping mechanisms during stress and relevance to human health.