High school students from all sites of the ResearcHStart program spent a day on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus shortly before wrapping up their summer of learning.
ResearcHStart is an intensive cancer research experience and partnership between the University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University, and Rush University. Students from the Illinois cohort are paired with Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) members who guide them through developing a cancer-related project.
ResearcHStart Illinois cohort: Malak Halabya, Aleksandra Goncalo, Maya Aviram, Bonnie Weaver, Shriya Nagaraj
This year’s all-site visit began at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine’s Jump Simulation Center where students got hands-on experience with medical training tools. They then participated in a scavenger hunt inspired by alumnus Ira Cohen’s time at Illinois. Ira and Debra Cohen helped initiate researcHStart and Debra has continued to support CCIL students through scholarships since Ira’s passing in 2021.
The day concluded with a talk from Zane Thornburg, a postdoctoral fellow with the CCIL and Beckman Institute under the supervision of CCIL Director Rohit Bhargava. He works in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Quantitative Cell Biology on a project called “CraftCells: A Window into Biological Cells.” The team has built Minecraft models of whole cells, allowing users to walk through, build, and manipulate them. “We’re not making up structures here,” he said. “We’re taking real data and converting it into models that anyone can explore.”
Postdoctoral fellow Zane Thornburg demonstrates CraftCells.
Thornburg’s presentation demonstrated how science and creativity can come together in unexpected ways and served as a reminder to researcHStart participants that their options are endless as they look to their futures.
“My goal is to give people a much better sense of what there is in biology,” he said. “This isn’t just for researchers. Anyone with a laptop, even a 10-year-old one can download our models and explore real biological structures. That’s the point: science should be for everyone.”
Editor’s notes:
This story was written by Javeria Malik, CCIL Communications Intern.