Early in the morning of a summer day, high school students Hope Jett and Kari Koerner are counting mosquitoes in a tree-canopied clearing of Tyson Research Center, Washington University in St. Louis’ sprawling environmental field station in west St. Louis County.
They are part of the Mosquito Team, a WashU research project to better understand the ecology and evolution of mosquitoes. The work is important because mosquitoes are a major transmitter of disease.
“I’ve worked with lots of animals, but mosquitoes are just so relevant to humans,” said Lauren Johnson, a PhD student in biology in Arts & Sciences and one of the Mosquito Team mentors. “There’s such a huge public health impact.”
Jett, a rising senior at Washington High School, in Washington, Mo., and Koerner, a recent graduate of Rockwood Summit High School, in Fenton, Mo., are here as paid Tyson Environmental Research Apprenticeship (TERA) interns. Launched in 2009, the TERA program has provided about 200 mentored field research opportunities to high school students from across the St. Louis region.
On this morning, Jett and Koerner are collecting data for Johnson, who is investigating how different types of light impact mosquito growth.
Johnson and Tyson senior scientist Katie Westby watch from a distance, ready to answer student questions. Westby remembers the first year she worked on a Tyson team with high school students.
“I was a little horrified my first summer,” Westby said, laughing. “High school students? That’s crazy. But they’re great.”
Once field observations are complete for the day, it’s time for the TERA interns to work on their own research projects.
TERA aims to treat high schoolers like undergraduate students, giving them more responsibility than they’ve likely had before and holding them to high expectations. That feeling of responsibility and freedom culminates in their summerlong research projects.
Jett is working on a project that measures the growth of mosquito larvae in tire water, which is especially relevant for landfills. Koerner is delving further into light’s effect on mosquito growth, hoping to understand how mosquito eggs grow differently in urban, light-polluted environments.
In the Mosquito Lab, the TERA students are working with undergraduate fellows to blood feed the mosquito colonies they use in various experiments. Blood feeding, or feeding small amounts of sheep’s blood to mosquitoes, might sound like a nightmare to some, but it’s a highlight in a TERA student’s day.
“In any job, you have to learn,” Koerner said. “And I learned how to blood feed. Once I got into the swing of it, it’s no big deal. It’s actually really fun.”
Technician Merlin Uder, a student at St. Charles Community College, and Elena Powell, a student at Northern Arizona University, delicately placed small sacs of blood into the containers. Both are former TERA interns and said the experience helped them grow personally and academically.
“TERA was the great first step of being treated as an adult with adult responsibilities,” Uder said. “I was treated like an equal but was still given the grace to learn. That’s one of the best things about Tyson.”
Jett chimed in from behind the “Ghostbuster,” a piece of equipment that sucks up mosquitoes and resembles the movies’ famous proton packs. She said she was surprised by how much her mentors and undergraduate peers cared about her input in their work.
“When I first started, I was so scared. As a young person in professional environments, you’re not given the same voice as older people,” Jett said. “I think it’s really cool that we get to do this work.”
Powell said that her first summer at Tyson showed her that she is welcome in science, no matter how daunting it may seem.
“I love it here because it’s so inviting to high schoolers, even though science can be a very closed-off environment,” Powell said. “The community at Tyson is one of the biggest things we have.”
Susan Flowers, Tyson’s coordinator of education, outreach, and diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusivity, said that Tyson established the program because high schoolers from all backgrounds need more opportunities for professional experience, especially in environmental science.
“There was a niche to be filled in St. Louis areas for students to be able to find out whether this was a career path they were interested in,” Flowers said. “There are programs for students to see if they like being in a laboratory setting, but this is specific to being in the field. And that’s something that you don’t really see.”
But the TERA summer hasn’t been all blood feeding and butterflies. Jett and Koerner agreed that the biggest lesson they’ve learned in the woods of Tyson is that research can be frustrating, a process of constant trial and error.
Halfway through the summer, flooding destroyed some outdoor experiments, including Jett’s. She said that she had to start her work from scratch, testing out new ways to conduct her experiment.
“I’ve realized what real science is,” Jett said. “It has given me resilience. Sometimes you have flooding that floods your whole lab or a mouse that gets in your experiment. But I’m learning how to adapt.”
