Student Profile: Sam Wang
While many AHS students may have been having fun and exploring exotic lands abroad during the summer, our very own Sam Wang was hard at work making his own discoveries about plant oxylipin, aldehydes and jasmonic acids by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Now, for those of you who are not fluent in the language of Plant Biology, it means that Sam Wang, a senior, has done six weeks of research at UC Davis as a participant in the Young Scholars Program (YSP), being one of the forty students in program out of the two hundred that applied. According to J. Richard Pomeroy, director of YSP, “A major emphasis of the program is giving students the opportunity to gain an understanding of biological science research and its interdisciplinary impact on other fields via an in-depth research experience in state-of-the-art laboratories.” Working alongside his fellow scientific scholars, whose projects ranged from Assassin bug instars and maggot aggregation to how aerosol particles at ground level are suspended in the atmosphere, Sam Wang quickly and eagerly acquired the lab experience he had sought to get his hands on from the very beginning. In addition, Sam received an internship and was able to do individual as well as one-on-one research with UC Davis post doctoral researcher Katie Dehesh on plant responses to environmental stress by measuring the level of aldehydes in genetically engineered plants and level of jasmonic acid in wounded plant tissue. Discoveries in this field of science may be extremely crucial to future generation for, as Sam reports, “If we're able to generate transgenic plants with modified oxylipin profile, then we can modify crops and decrease the need for pesticides…And save the environment of course.” Present day concerns about climate change and global environment issues are especially hot topics, being the first of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and Sam hopes that the valuable methods he learned will benefit him in his future pursuits. Throughout his six weeks on the campus of UC Davis, Sam has dutifully and meticulously kept his research notebooks and written articles describing his research project for he is expected to present the conclusions of this individual project at a research symposium. However, that’s not all Sam’s going to be up to, he will also be giving a presentation of his research to students on our very own campus at Arcadia High School. We look forward to your presentation and congratulate you on your research Sam!
While many AHS students may have been having fun and exploring exotic lands abroad during the summer, our very own Sam Wang was hard at work making his own discoveries about plant oxylipin, aldehydes and jasmonic acids by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Now, for those of you who are not fluent in the language of Plant Biology, it means that Sam Wang, a senior, has done six weeks of research at UC Davis as a participant in the Young Scholars Program (YSP), being one of the forty students in program out of the two hundred that applied. According to J. Richard Pomeroy, director of YSP, “A major emphasis of the program is giving students the opportunity to gain an understanding of biological science research and its interdisciplinary impact on other fields via an in-depth research experience in state-of-the-art laboratories.” Working alongside his fellow scientific scholars, whose projects ranged from Assassin bug instars and maggot aggregation to how aerosol particles at ground level are suspended in the atmosphere, Sam Wang quickly and eagerly acquired the lab experience he had sought to get his hands on from the very beginning. In addition, Sam received an internship and was able to do individual as well as one-on-one research with UC Davis post doctoral researcher Katie Dehesh on plant responses to environmental stress by measuring the level of aldehydes in genetically engineered plants and level of jasmonic acid in wounded plant tissue. Discoveries in this field of science may be extremely crucial to future generation for, as Sam reports, “If we're able to generate transgenic plants with modified oxylipin profile, then we can modify crops and decrease the need for pesticides…And save the environment of course.” Present day concerns about climate change and global environment issues are especially hot topics, being the first of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and Sam hopes that the valuable methods he learned will benefit him in his future pursuits. Throughout his six weeks on the campus of UC Davis, Sam has dutifully and meticulously kept his research notebooks and written articles describing his research project for he is expected to present the conclusions of this individual project at a research symposium. However, that’s not all Sam’s going to be up to, he will also be giving a presentation of his research to students on our very own campus at Arcadia High School. We look forward to your presentation and congratulate you on your research Sam!