A student-run organization at Harvard GSAS.What is JEI?
The Journal of Emerging Investigators is an open-access journal that publishes original research written by middle and high school students in biological and physical science. JEI provides students, under the guidance of a teacher or advisor, the opportunity to submit and gain feedback on original research and to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Because grade-school students often lack access to formal research institutions, we expect that the work submitted by students may come from classroom-based projects, science fair projects, or other forms of mentor-supervised research.
JEI is a non-profit group run and operated by graduate students at Harvard University. JEI also provides the opportunity for graduate students to participate in the editorial, review, and publication process. Our hope is that JEI will serve as an exciting new forum to engage young students in a novel kind of science education that nurtures the development and achievements of young scientists throughout the country.
Who we are
The founders and editorial board of JEI are graduate students in the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. Since the founding, we have expanded to include graduate students from all scientific fields.
How JEI came to be
As graduate students and laboratory scientists, we rarely have time or energy to think outside the bench (and I mean our immediate bench, please don’t ask me what my friend across from me is working on). Thank goodness for our weekly student-led journal club where each week a graduate student presents a research article, which usually has nothing to do with the science that any of us are directly working on. It is during this hour of food and science that us graduate students get a glimpse into the world of “other” science. One week in late 2010 a student presented this paper: Blackawton Bees (Biology Letters, November 2010). Of course none of us work on bees, but we were particularly interested in this article because it was written by a class of third graders…yep, as in eight to ten year old children. As you can imagine, that journal discussion had little to do about the science and much to do about what an interesting approach to science education this is. Third graders had thought of the questions, designed and carried out the experiments, and interpreted the results. How many other students had the same potential? Probably thousands. That got us thinking… how awesome would it be to promote this kind of research based science and wouldn’t it be great if students could publish their research in a peer-reviewed journal created for just that intent? And thus the idea for this journal was born.
Our Staff
Sarah Fankhauser
JEI President
Sarah is originally from Georgia and received her bachelors degree in biology from Georgia Tech. She is currently working on her Ph.D. in microbiology at Harvard Medical School in Michael Starnbach’s lab. Sarah is interested in how bacteria can evade our immune system and how our immune system fights bacterial infections.
Lincoln Pasquina
Co-Editor-in-Chief
Lincoln’s first experience with the scientific method was his 7th grade science project on the effects of microwaving plant seeds before planting. (10 seconds on medium makes seeds germinate faster than untreated controls. 30 seconds cooks the seeds.) After graduating from MIT with a major in Biology, he became a graduate student in Suzanne Walker’s lab at Harvard, where he is currently studying bacterial cell wall synthesis and inhibition. He hopes to contribute to the ongoing fight against antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
Chris Wells
Co-Editor-in-Chief
After getting excited about science in high school, Chris attended Brown University and received a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His graduate research at Harvard uses a common model organism (the bacterium E. coli) to study a universal process called transcription, which uses an organism’s genetic material to create the messages that direct the synthesis of the cell’s protein machinery.
Amy Rohlfing
JEI Secretary, Associate Editor
Amy grew up in the Chicago area and attended the University of Iowa where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry. She is now a PhD student at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Simon Dove. She is interested in how the disease causing bacterium Francisella tularensis (which can infect humans and rabbits) is able control when to turn on expression of the genes needed to cause disease. After completing her PhD, Amy hopes pursue a career in teaching at the undergraduate level.
Dave Gondek
Associate Editor
Dave is an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College, where he runs a lab examining the cell biology of host-pathogen interactions during bacterial infection. Despite starting out as a high school and middle school science teacher, Dave later went on to receive his PhD from Dartmouth College and conduct post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty at Ithaca.
Sean Fankhauser
Associate Editor
Sean has always been fascinated by the science of weather which inspired him to earn his bachelor and masters degrees from Georgia Tech. He currently works at the Museum of Science in Boston, where he gives lectures on current science and technology, and also works as a weather observer at the Blue Hill Weather Observatory in Massachusetts.
Bryan McGuffie
Associate Editor
Bryan grew up in Michigan and received his bachelors degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan. He is currently a PhD student at Harvard Medical School in Simon Dove’s lab studying how the disease causing bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa controls when specific genes are expressed.
Andrew Olive
Associate Editor
Andrew grew up in the Midwest and attended college at the University of Kansas where he received a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology. He is currently a PhD student at Harvard Medical School in Michael Starnbach’s lab examining how bacterial pathogens alter host cells to promote infection and avoid the immune response.
Jennifer Doody
Copy Editor
A graduate student at the Harvard Extension School, Jennifer is finishing her ALM in English and pursuing a second ALM in Dramatic Arts. As a former medical and science editor, she edited manuscripts for successful publication in Cancer, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Clinical Oncology. She hopes to complete her PhD so she can teach and direct Shakespeare’s plays at the college level, as well as promoting performing arts in public spaces.
Melissa Wu
Copy Editor
Melissa Wu is a PhD student in Emanuela Gussoni’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where she studies the process by which muscle cells fuse together and form different kinds of muscle. She used her captaincy of Science Olympiad in high school as a platform for engaging students of all backgrounds in science, and since then has had an interest in increasing science interest and accessibility.
Mei Rosa Ng
Staff Writer
Rosa began her scientific research career investigating plant molecular biology back in high school. She then attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, studying Biochemical Sciences and pursuing research in a variety of fields, from chemistry to bioengineering. The thrill of interdisciplinary research brought her to her current graduate project in the laboratory of Dr. Joan Brugge at Harvard Medical School, using microscopy and bioengineering tools to understand how groups of cells communicate and cooperate to move together in order to heal a wound or, in the case of cancer, metastasize.
Cristina Montero Diez
Outreach Coordinator
Cristina is a senior graduate student in the Hochschild Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, studying how bacteria and their associated viruses modulate gene expression. Outside of the laboratory, she is interested in science education and communication (particularly biology) and hopes to pursue teaching at the high school or undergraduate level after graduation.
Kathleen Nevis, Ph.D.
Outreach Coordinator
Kathleen is originally from Oregon and received her Bachelors degree in Physiology and Neurobiology at the University of Connecticut. She received her PhD in Molecular Pathology at the University of North Carolina in 2009 where she studied cell cycle regulation and cancer. Currently, Kathleen is a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital in the labs of Caroline and Geoff Burns. Her current research utilizes zebrafish to understand early events of heart development.
Stephanie Jehl
Outreach Consultant
Stephanie received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School in 2010. Stephanie studied how our immune systems fight off infections with harmful intestinal bacteria, such as Shigella flexneri. Stephanie is interested in working to address the enormous burden of infectious diseases on health in the developing world and is currently consulting for a hospital in Cambodia.
David Cardozo, Ph.D.
Faculty Advisor
Dr. Cardozo is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and an Assistant Professor in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Most of Dr. Cardozo’s efforts are directed towards medical student education, including teaching the Human Nervous System and Behavior course. He is also an enormous advocate for student academic and personal success and has been an integral part of the formation of JEI.