Local Fresno high school students, Elizabeth Harris of San Joaquin Memorial, Katherine and Phillip Harrison of Bullard, and Ben Porter of Central High-East will be starting their senior year ready to pursue their dreams of becoming a physician after spending the summer at the University of California San Francisco, Fresno as research interns in the prestigious Summer Biomedical Research Internship Program. The Summer Biomedical program selects Valley students based on academic merit, student questionnaires, SAT exam scores, and letters of recommendation. Only 12 students were admitted into the rigorous 10-week program.
Each student is matched with a faculty member from UCSF-Fresno. Together, the student and faculty work daily on a given research project. Elizabeth Harris’s internship was with the Fresno County Health Department. She worked along side Pouran Sohrabi, Ed.D, researching the use of health care by teens. Katherine Harrison’s internship was at the Fresno Veteran’s Hospital (VA) working with Paulette Ginier, MD, on a diabetes study. Phillip Harrison performed his internship at the VA working with Kent Yamaguchi, MD, and Rick Stewart, MA, in a study of skin flaps in plastic surgery. Ben Porter’s internship—also at the VA—involved treatments for surgical wounds along side Abdolkarim Nasrabadi, MD. All the interns presented the results of their studies in UCSF-Fresno’s auditorium recently to an audience of their families, faculty members and their respective school representatives.
Over the 10-week UCSF-Fresno program, the interns were exposed to a wide spectrum of scientific issues. They shadowed emergency medicine doctors at University Medical Center, went into surgery, and visited the coroner’s office. Highlights included trips to UCSF’s main campus in San Francisco where interns toured labs studying embryonic development and protein folding, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where they participated in a hands-on human genome related science experiment.
When the students go back to school, they will return to their favorite subjects ranging from chemistry, biology, statistics and physics to art, English and history. All note unanimously however, that they study science because, “It’s cool.”
