With their Faculty Mentor, Schupf Scholars Explore Genetics in the Classroom and the Lab
Emma Fink ’11 and Rebecca Resnick ’10 developed their shared passion for biology early on. Resnick remembers when her father, a cardiologist, gave her a pig’s heart for an elementary school science project. “Everyone else thought it was gross. I was fascinated.” Fink remembers being “hooked on biology from the time I first focused a microscope in the fifth grade.” Both students later developed an interest in scientific research during summers spent at university laboratories.
When deciding where to attend college, Fink and Resnick considered the opportunities to do research. They both received invitations and funding to participate in special programs for student-scientists at prestigious research universities—and turned them down to come to Amherst. “I got the feeling that I might end up just washing beakers at the university I was considering,” Resnick said. “At Amherst, it seemed clear that I could work with research scientists, participate fully in research, and even design my own experiments. Amherst and the Schupf Program ended up exceeding all my expectations.”
Fink and Resnick’s plans include earning M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, and the Schupf Program has helped them begin to gain the knowledge, experience, and technical expertise that they will need. In courses such as “Molecules, Genes, and Cells” and “Genetic Analysis of Biological Processes,” taught by their faculty mentor, Associate Professor of Biology Caroline Goutte, the students have studied fundamental concepts of molecular and classical genetics. They have also assisted with Professor Goutte’s genetics research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
In the lab, Fink and Resnick have been exploring mutations in the Notch pathway genes in Caenorhabditis elegans, a microscopic nematode worm that is popular among research biologists because of its value as a genetic model system. The students have spent many hours examining the worms through a microscope and have learned to identify the genetic mutations that affect the animals’ development, and which form an essential part of the research study.
What Professor Goutte, Fink, and Resnick learn from Caenorhabditis elegans might one day have implications for developing a better understanding of some diseases that afflict humans, since the molecular pathways that mediate cellular communication in these animals are not so different from our own. For now, recognizing that the process of
scientific discovery is an incremental one, Professor Goutte and the students are taking things one worm at a time.