Jensen’s Internship Begins at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab
Huntington High School senior Madeline Jensen has quite an after school activity lined up for herself this year. She is one of only six Long Island students accepted into the Cold Spring Harbor Lab’s Partners for the Future program. It will give you an opportunity to conduct original research in some of the best facilities in the world.
Ms. Jensen started the internship in early September. The Partners for the Future program brings high school seniors into the Cold Spring Harbor complex, teams them with a scientist mentor and allows them to conduct original biomedical research for a minimum of ten hours a week from September through March.
“Congratulations Madeline and we look forward to hearing about your research” said Kenneth Graham, Huntington’s new director of science.
The Partners for Future program is open to all 126 Long Island school districts and most of them compete to place students in the world renowned lab. The grueling selection process eventually narrows the field to a relatively small group of semifinalists who are the subjected to intense short interviews by a half dozen scientists to determine their level of commitment about joining and fully participating with a research team.
Ms. Jensen is working in the Hershey Lab on the Cold Spring Harbor campus, conducting research with her mentor, associate professor Senthil K. Muthuswamy. He earned his Ph.D. in 1995 at Canada’s McMaster University and is conducting research that focuses on understanding cancer initiation using three-dimensional epithelial structures.
The Lab seeks seniors who have a real thirst for research and who are willing to invest a substantial amount of time pursuing it each week. The Lab avoids those looking to pad their academic resumes for college application purposes.
Science department chairs from across Long Island are allowed up to three nominations for inclusion in the program and the process results annually in a handful of students being selected to participate. Ms. Jensen is now being asked to contribute to the overall success of her team’s research and she will live the life of a professional scientist.
Cold Spring Harbor Lab is actually a series of labs, each devoted to a particular area of study. During the internship Ms. Jensen will make presentations and work with many of the leading scientists in the world who are conducting research in the Hershey building’s lab facilities. The program concludes each spring with the high school participants making oral presentations about their research projects to an audience of scientific mentors, Lab administrators, parents and teachers.
Ms. Jensen is the fifth Huntington senior to participate in the program since it began in 1990. Jay Bikoff (1994-95), Ilana Kurshan (1995-96) and Jonathan Widawsky (2002-03) and Hannah Payne (2006-07) each participated. The first three went to top tier colleges. Mr. Bikoff went to Brown, Ms. Kurshan to Harvard, Mr. Widawsky to the University of Rochester and Ms. Payne began Dartmouth earlier this month.
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