Emma is a rising senior at West Seattle High School in the fall of 2018. She’s been lucky to have many great science teachers and mentors that have helped her pursue her love for science and biology! She has taken biology, chemistry, and physics classes in high school and her love for the laboratory aspect of those classes pushed her to apply for this internship. Her favorite classes have always been science classes because of the insights she gains about the world around her and the hands-on lab work experience. Some of her favorite memories from her science classes have been designing, building and testing trebuchets and chemically extracting the scent from a grapefruit, both of which pushed her to problem-solve and think outside the box. She finds science and research so engaging because of the constant new knowledge and discoveries that continue to change the field.
While at ISB, Emma has been working on the Systems Medicine project in the Baliga Lab with Ethan and mentors Becky Howsmon and Claudia Ludwig, where she has gotten to help develop high school curriculum and experiment using Halobacterium as a model organism, all while learning about the benefits of P4 healthcare! Throughout the internship, she has done multiple experiments with Halobacterium and E-coli, working to develop labs that would be available to students in a new Systems Medicine course. She has also had the opportunity to hear from some of ISB’s experts on 21st century medicine, learning about future of research and care in biomedicine. To learn more about what she and Ethan did this summer, check here. She hopes that after this internship, she can continue to spread the knowledge and benefits of P4 healthcare until it becomes common practice in the future.
When she’s not in the classroom or the laboratory, Emma does ballet, plays the clarinet in marching and concert band, mixes sound for the theater program and plays the piano in jazz ensemble. She also does swim team and Link Crew and is an NHS officer for her school. Although she is very busy, she loves all of the activities she does and hopes that later in life she can combine her love for the arts and communications with her love of biology. Even though she might not know yet what career she wants or even what her major will be in college, she knows that she would love to pursue science in some form, and her experience at ISB has taught her so much. She couldn’t have done this without the love and support from her friends and family, and she’s grateful for them every day. She hopes that she can use everything she’s learned during this internship to inspire positive change both in the scientific community and the world around her! If you have any questions about the work she’s done or about applying for this internship, you can email her at laplante.emma.2019@gmail.com.
