Nationally, Native American enrollment in postsecondary programs is less than one percent, so Berkeley Lab launched an ambitious internship program to help boost representation by recruiting students from Arizona State University to work at the Lab. Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division Science Deputy Trent Northen helps lead the program.
Northen earned a doctorate from ASU where he met fellow scientist Gary Moore, from the Powhatan Nation, in the same National Science Foundation fellowship. The two share a common interest in helping address the inequitable representation of Native Americans in science. They worked with the Berkeley Lab Foundation’s Alicia Chang and Workforce Development and Education’s Colette Flood and Laleh Coté to establish the Arizona State University-Berkeley Lab STEM Pathways initiative, now in its second year.
This summer, Berkeley Lab hosted four interns as part of the program. One of the ASU interns, Kaela Henry, participated in a project at the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU) working on biological carbon dioxide conversion to aviation fuel under the guidance of mentors Eric Sundstrom and Young Eun (Dylan) Song. Another, Tonana Ben, studied novel genetic elements involved in craniofacial development in EGSB’s Mammalian Functional Genomics Laboratory under the guidance of mentors Axel Visel, Laura Cook, and Neil Slaven.
Read more in Elements and at Arizona State University.
