Do you know what I did this summer?

I don't post much here anymore. Kathleen does such an excellent job of showing everyone what our family has been up to, I just sit back and watch the magic happen. Every once in a while, though I have a story to tell. This is one of those stories.

This summer I had the opportunity to mentor a high school student, Lanair Lett, for a six week period in the summer. During that time Lanair worked on my HDAC1 project. He did a fantastic job, and was able to succesfully demonstrate that HDAC1 can cause pancreatic beta-cells to reporduce. Why is that imporatnt? By the time you are a teenager, you have pretty much all of the beta-cells that you are going to get. There are exceptions, the mass increases with obesity and it increases with pregnancy, but in both cases this increase is only transient. To be able to increase the number of beta-cells while maintaining the beta-cell function is an important event.

Well, after working with me Lanair applied to and was made a semi-finalist in the prestigious Siemens competition. He won his regional competition, and this last week went on to nationals to compete as one of the 6 selected high school students from across the country. Lanairs talk can be seen here. He did a great job, finished in fourth place, and won a $30,000 scholarship. We were so excited for him, and you can see the news report about the outcome here.

So what did I learn? I enjoy directing science as much as I enjoy doing science. There were times when the mentoring was a struggle, but the end result was great. I like teaching, it was fun to see Lanair "get it" when he started to see the applications of the science and started to understand what his data meant.

Other Articles:

MyNC.com
News and Observer



It has been a fun couple of days, to see the end results of our work over the summer.