Summer students have done much to help advance research at City of Hope, and a few have been lucky enough to have their contributions recognized in significant ways.  Many City of Hope investigators cite summer students as co-authors on papers, not only giving their students the thrill of seeing their name in print, but giving them a great addition to their CV for future educational and career pursuits. Several of our high school students have submitted their projects to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and have won scholarships. Sometimes the work even translates into valuable intellectual property such as inventions.

In a short, 10-week period, several students have made major research strides. To give just three examples:

Sunil Vemuri (UCLA), working with Terry Lee, Ph.D., created a computer program to analyze mass spectral data.(1) Rights to the program were purchased by Sciex, which included it in a data systems software package sold around the world. Vemuri and Lee even received a portion of the royalties.

Lawrence Williams, Ph.D., knew how much radiation a healthy human organ could withstand but needed to predict the level that could be administered safely to a patient whose organ was compromised by cancer. To create a computer model of a safe range of radiation doses that would still deliver effective radiotherapy to the tumor, he turned to summer student Daniel Kaplan (University of California, San Diego), who successfully designed such a model.(2)

Shiuan Chen, Ph.D., curious about the chemopreventive (anticancer) qualities of natural products, sent summer student Annette Kwon (Pomona College) to the supermarket to buy fruits and vegetables. Her subsequent assignment was to isolate their active ingredients, eventually resulting in a joint publication.(3)

1.  T.D. Lee and S. Vemuri (1990). MacProMass: A computer program to correlate mass spectral data to peptide and protein structures. Biomedical and Environmental Mass Spectrometry 19, 639-45.

2.   D.D. Kaplan, L.E. Williams, K.G. Clarke, T.L. Odom-Maryon, A. Liu, G. Lopatin, A.A. Raubitscheck and J.K. Wong (1997). Estimating residence times and their associated errors in patient absorbed-dose calculation. Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology 25, 264-68.

3.   S. Chen, X.Z Sun, Y.-C. Kao, A. Kwon, D. Zhou and E. Eng (1998). Suppression of breast cancer cell growth with grape juice. Pharmaceutical Biology 36, 53-61.