LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Applications for the 2011 Summer Research Internship Program at the University of Louisville James Graham Brown Cancer Center are due April 11.
The Summer Research Internship Program is a day program that provides high school sophomores, juniors and seniors and a limited number of college undergraduates with hands-on scientific research experience. There is no cost to participants to attend the program. Application materials are available on the Brown Cancer Center web site (www.browncancercenter.org).
Participants commit a minimum of 20 hours per week for eight weeks from mid-June to mid-August. Each is assigned to a faculty researcher mentor in whose laboratory they work. Weekly seminars also expose the interns to cutting edge research and current hot topics in a variety of biomedical research subjects.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for students interested in science to get a feel for biomedical research and experience it as a junior researcher would experience it,” said Diane Konzen, program director. “The program began in 2003, and our interns have gone on to undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Louisville as well as Yale, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, University of Virginia, Barnard College and others. They leave the program with actual experience working in a laboratory with Brown Cancer Center research scientists.”
Competition for the approximately 25 openings in the program is high, Konzen said. “The program has grown to attract the most creative and committed students of science. There are usually in excess of 10 applications for each opening,” she said.
Applications are screened by a committee of research faculty that selects the interns and matches them to their research mentors. Participants will be announced in early to mid-May.
At the end of the program, the interns gain experience presenting their research through preparation of research posters that are displayed at a special poster session. They also are invited back in the fall to present their posters at the Brown Cancer Center’s Annual Research Retreat and at Research!Louisville, an annual meeting highlighting research at the University of Louisville. These sessions are organized in the same way as major scientific meeting poster sessions, allowing interns to experience how advances in research are shared in the scientific community.
On an individual basis, a limited number of interns continue to work with their research mentors during the school year, and some are invited back for a second summer to complete more complex research projects.