The Department of Biology is offering 6-week-long summer research internships for High School Teachers who are teaching full-time in the greater Boston area. This program is an opportunity for local science teachers to spend six weeks in a research lab at MIT working on real-life projects and honing skills to bring back to the classroom.

The program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, provides a generous stipend, and professional development points. At the end of the summer Teacher-interns are required to present a poster of their work, to write a 5-page summary of their research, and to produce a lesson plan or hands-on lab exercise for their classroom based on their summer internship.

Interested teachers should fill out the application form and mail with an updated CV and cover letter to Dr. Mandana Sassanfar (see form for address). The cover letter should describe briefly how the summer internship will benefit the teacher and his/her students, and concrete plans to bring some of the knowledge acquired during the summer internship back to the classroom.

Lab protocols from previous years are available for review to illustrate what sorts of activities and experiments are performed.

In 2009 the department hosted two high school teachers:

Lisa Curtin of Somerville High school worked in the laboratory of Dr. Andreas Hochwagen, at the Whitehead Institute.

Sarah Follenweider from the English High school worked in the laboratory of HHMI Investigator Dianne Newman under the guidance of Dr. Lars Dietrich.

In 2008 the biology department hosted 4 teacher interns.

Lisa Curtin of Somerville High school worked in the laboratory of HHMI investigator and Naubel Laureate Susumu Tonegawa. The Tonegawa lab aims to understand special and temporal memory acquisition, Fragile X Syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.

"My main project for the summer was to design a trace-conditioning behavioral protocol for a project on Fragile X Syndrome. Trace fear conditioning is a method for discerning between wild type mice and mice with an attention-based memory deficit, such as Fragile X Mental Retardation.  The aim of my project was to modify the trace conditioning protocol so the results would robustly distinguish differences in memory acquisition between the two groups of mice.

This experience was extremely positive and rewarding. I enjoyed working in a lab setting with scientists that were eager to show and teach me about their projects. I had the opportunity to observe numerous techniques including a cellular electrophysiology microscopy that is rarely performed, memory acquisition recordings, and western blot techniques. The members of the Tonegawa lab were accommodating and patient teachers. I have used the knowledge I obtained on memory acquisition to build a lesson plan that allows students to explore the brain, understand how learning occurs, and how to apply that to improving learning in school. "

Amanda Hartman of Somerville High School was the 2007 intern. She had this to say about her experience: "I was privileged to receive the HHMI Summer Teacher Internship for this summer. For the past 6 weeks, I have been working in Dr. Littleton's fly lab at the Picower Institute. It has been an excellent and invaluable experience. I have been working closely with one of his graduate students, Sarah Huntwork, as she uses fruit flies to investigate the structure of a protein involved in synaptic vesicle fusion (in other words, how this protein exactly helped out with getting messages from one brain cell to another). I feel very fortunate to have had this glimpse of a scientist's daily life: a lot of brainpower and collaboration going into the projects, followed by days of 'grunt work', with occasional checking in and problem-solving along the way, and eventually, hopefully, some positive results."

Lisa Curtin of Sommerville High School

Sarah Follenweider of the English High School