Middleburg high school partners with UVA to offer girls the chance to do ground-breaking lab work in molecular science

Foxcroft School is proud to announce the Foxcroft Summer Science Research Institute, a six-week, inquiry-based research program in molecular biology for high school girls making its debut next summer. Under the direction of Foxcroft Science Department Chair Julie Ervin, this unique program will give high school girls experience conducting ground-breaking, university-level research projects. Ervin is working with University of Virginia biology research scientist Dr. Anthony Spano to coordinate the projects.

The Institute will be held in the science laboratories on Foxcroft's Middleburg campus and will run from June 29 until August 7, beginning at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 3:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. The cost is $750 and includes lunch in the School's Dining Hall. In addition, participants will travel to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville at program's end to meet with Dr. Spano to discuss their findings, and to tour university-level laboratory facilities. To obtain a brochure, call 540.687.4510 or email jervin@foxcroft.org.

"This is an exciting program that will foster an understanding of today's science and increase independent scientific thought," says Ervin. "It will also empower students to think critically and problem-solve, and allow them to take responsibility for how molecular biology is used in their world."

During the first week of the program, students will learn basic molecular techniques such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), subcloning, culturing, bacterial transformation, DNA sequencing, DNA gel electrophoresis, protein gels, and Western blots. Then, Dr. Spano will visit Foxcroft to give a detailed overview of the project topics the students will be working on and why they are of interest to the scientific community. Projects will be assigned to teams of students based on their interests and will be the focus of the students' work for the remaining five weeks of the program.

During this time, mornings will be spent brainstorming and determining a set of experiments to perform in order to answer questions pertaining to the team's research projects. The students will discuss their proposed experiments with Dr. Spano and Ms. Ervin on a daily basis. Each team will spend the afternoon carrying out the experiments that have been approved. By the end of six weeks, each student will have made progress in inquiry-based learning, trouble-shooting, data analysis, and in learning molecular biology laboratory techniques while using top-of-the-line equipment.

Each student will write a scientific paper explaining her project, the experiments performed, why they were performed, the results obtained from the experiments, and what the results imply. These scientific papers will be reviewed, shared with Dr. Spano and submitted to contests such as the Siemens Westinghouse and Intel competitions during the fall of 2009. Students will earn one full credit in science from Foxcroft upon successful completion of the Institute.

Ms. Ervin, who has headed Foxcroft's Science Department since 2007, earned her B.S. in Biology at Mary Washington University and her M.S. at the University of Virginia, where she studied the light-independent biosynthesis of chlorophyll in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Dr. Spano holds a Ph.D. in Biology from Brandeis University and has spent most of his career working as a research scientist at UVA. His special research interests include photosynthesis, photovoltaic devices, virus self-assembly, and self-assembly.