On April 8, students enrolled in the Advanced Biology Electives (ABE) Research class presented their research at the High School LGI during lunch. Five students— seniors Sophia Reutzel, Hayden Kissell, Charlotte DeVoir, Sofia Cardenas-Miller, and Sam Huggins— shared their individual projects, along with a group project.
The ABE research course is taught by Danielle Rosensteel, who also teaches Advanced Botany, Advanced Zoology, Advanced Genetics, and Advanced Microbiology.
“The class is set up to do collegiate global research at the high school setting, and the goal of this class is to teach them the ins and outs of how to do research in every facet,” Rosensteel said.“It’s giving them one leg up or a foot in the door, and all of the challenges that come with research, and if they can work through those challenges with me, then they’re gonna be more successful to start research earlier on in their college career.”
Presenters rigorously prepared for this symposium. Students have completed group projects to get them ready for their individual projects, which started around December, that they presented during the symposium. They practiced their individual presentations multiple times during class to ensure that they were ready.
Presentations were all on experiments that the presenters authenticity carried out using real-world data and supplies. Kissell, one of the five presenters at the symposium, described her experiment and presentation topic.
“My individual project was dealing with Zooplankton and E. Coli. Zooplankton Daphnia Magna is a freshwater species, and I was seeing how they reacted to E. Coli in water, and if they were able to decrease the concentrations, as far as like water quality control,”Kissell said.
To conduct this experiment, Kissell received model organisms from Carolina Biological. This is just one of the examples of networking that the class relies on to produce high level research. .
“We’re also working with several labs at Penn State through extension opportunities and pilot projects to expand our research and take our research globally, and we are continuing with a few of those labs…some of our research that we conducted here at the lab was taken into the field in, the Paramo region outside of Bogota, Colombia” Rosensteel said.
During the event, the LGI room was fully packed with various students, faculty, and guests, all locked in on each presentation.
“I was definitely very nervous, but I was really excited too, because, like, all my family came and saw me, which was exciting and nice,” Kissell said.
The students were proud of their work and Rosensteel applauded their performance.
“They met all of their goals in their projects and met all of their goals and their presentations to show how they’re able to take a higher level research project and design it, develop it and implement it at the high school and then be able to present that to an audience to share their work with others, so it was very successful and we had a wonderful turnout and they did a great job with their presentation,”Rosensteel said.
In the future, the student researchers are seeking to continue their scientific journey to higher levels.
“If we publish a paper, that would be really awesome, so that’s something we might try to do and then I do anticipate continuing research into the future…I wanna go study marine biology in university,” Kissell said.
Rosensteel reflected proudly on the work of her students, looking forward to their futures.
“I just want to emphasize how wonderful this is, how hard the students have worked and what a great job they did this year,” Rosensteel said. “ I’m very proud of them, and I would think they would be wonderful researchers in the future, so hopefully they continue with their research careers.”
