This summer, Bay Area high-school students from diverse backgrounds are spending their vacation performing basic research with Stanford faculty, postdoctoral fellows, students and researchers on medically-oriented projects as part of the Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program. The program, which receives financial support from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Creativity Awards, introduces high-school students to stem cell science in an effort to foster the next generation of scientists.
To document interns' experiences in the lab, CIRM has asked students to share blog entries, photos and videos about their research projects. Students are posting photos on Instagram and their videos on Youtube.
The short video above is from Mikaela Esquivel, a student at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, who is working with in the lab of craniofacial and plastic surgeon Peter Lorenz, MD. Michael Hu, MD, a postdoctoral research fellow working with Esquivel offers more details about her project and the task she performs in the video:
Mika's project entails isolating adipose-derived stem cells and placing them on wounds utilizing different delivery methods to determine which method results in the best delivery of cells and promotion of wound healing.
In this video, I was teaching Mika how to embed tissue in OCT for sectioning. We were embedding mice calvarium (the top part of the skull) to examine for bone growth in defects. Calvarial defects were made and treated with blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells placed on scaffolds to achieve osteogenesis and closure of the defect. However, this is not related to Mika's SIMR project. She was just learning this technique because she will be doing this for her own project.
Previously: Stanford summer research intern named finalist in national science competition
