A Scot science summer: MC STEM students take advantage of research opportunities, practical experiences and internships
July 13, 2023
From East Tennessee to Berkeley, California, to a quaint New York village in the shadow of the Adirondack range just 30 miles from the Canadian border, the STEM students of Maryville College are spending their summer applying what they’ve learned as undergraduates and gathering additional knowledge that will serve them well in the years to come.
It’s an enormous point of pride for Dr. Angelia Gibson, MC professor of chemistry, and Dr. Maria Siopsis, professor of mathematics — because the scope and breadth of the research opportunities these students are taking part in over the summer months is evidence of the groundwork they’ve laid as Scots, and the success of the STEM program known as the Scots Science Scholars (S3).
“This is huge for Maryville College STEM,” Gibson said, referring to the acronym referring to those majors and fields related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “We have the largest cohort of STEM students doing summer internships or STEM-related jobs since I’ve been at the College.”
And that, she added, was almost 20 years ago: 2005, roughly seven years before she and Siopsis (who joined the faculty in 2001) launched S3 — with support from the National Science Foundation — as a program designed to provide financial aid and academic enrichment and support for select students interested in pursuing MC STEM fields . Last fall, the duo released results of a study of the program revealing that over the course of 10 years, S3 has served almost 150 students and has improved graduation rates and STEM retention rates for low-income students.
Most importantly, Gibson added, is that S3 has become an incubator of innate talent and intelligence. MC STEM faculty work closely with students to assist them in obtaining research, technical or clinical experiences relevant to their career paths, and many students use their on-campus experiences as a springboard to internships and summer job opportunities that become stepping stones along the paths to their futures.
“S3 has been involved by educating our students about the value of internships/STEM work experiences since their first summer on campus before their first year, connecting S3 students with the (Maryville College) Career Center during the STEM portfolio course in their first year, nurturing contacts for STEM opportunities for our students, working with STEM faculty to curate a robust list of opportunities annually through our STEM Success Center, and by communicating regularly to all STEM students about opportunities, both through newsletters and individualized communications to students about opportunities that may are good fits for them,” Gibson said.
The record number of interns caps a banner year for STEM students and faculty, especially — but not limited to — Siopsis and Gibson. The pair marked the 10th anniversary of the Scots Science Scholars, and last April, the pair applied for, and received, $645,000 in federally allocated funding administered through the Funding to Improve Post-Secondary Education Community Fund (FIPSE), a program of the U.S. Department of Education.
Together, the duo has secured more than $2 million in federal grant money to support STEM at Maryville College — an investment that’s paying off in the quality of summer internships secured by all students enrolled in STEM coursework.
Mackenzie Nicholas ’24
Originally born in Seattle, Nicholas moved with her family to Kingsport, Tennessee, as a child, and while she’s always been interested in science, she said, it was the Instrumental Music program that originally drew her to campus.
She plays trumpet in the Orchestra at Maryville College, the MC3 Band, Tartanband and other ensembles, in addition to S3 membership and her work as a McGill Fellow to provide academic guidance as a lead mentor in the Academic Success Center. Where she finds time to also serve as a resident assistant, a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Tri-Beta science clubs and a Biology major is a testament to her own dedication and the preparation of S3’s summer bridge program, which brings students to campus two weeks early.
“Although it was during COVID, the summer program that S3 provides was extremely impactful,” she said. “It really solidified that I wanted to remain in the STEM field, and also showed me that I loved lab work in particular.”
Dr. Jennifer Brigati, chair of the Division of Natural Sciences and professor of biology, presented the opportunity that Nicholas took advantage of for her summer research, funded through the FIPSE grant: Researching Naegleria fowleri, better known as the “brain-eating amoeba.”
“This organism lives in warm freshwater around the world and causes Primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM),” Nicholas said. “I am testing different water sources in northeastern Tennessee for its presence. Most people get pretty scared at the thought of something that eats brains, but actually contracting this disease is very rare.
“Only about 200 people worldwide have been infected since 1965. The amoeba has to enter deep into the nasal cavity to infect a person. The CDC recommends using a nose plug when jumping into water in the summer, and boiling water used for flushing the nose.”
She’s working alongside another Scots Science Scholar and MC STEM student, Hannah Phillips ’24, and in addition to her research with Brigati, she’s volunteering at The Healing Hands Health Center in Kingsport, as well as taking online classes, for the summer. It’s still a hectic pace, but it’s preparing her well for medical school after graduation from MC, she said.
“I am very excited to get to work in the lab at my own pace,” she said. “I think that designing my own experiment and troubleshooting the inevitable problems that occur will be very helpful in future lab settings.”
Colton Gentry ’24
A native of Philadelphia, Tennessee, Gentry came to Maryville College with the intention of earning a degree in Business Analytics because, he said, “I read that math undergrads statistically do well on the LSAT exam,” he said.
“I thought that by choosing Business Analytics, I was really getting the best of both worlds between an Economics and a Mathematics major, which both do well on the LSAT,” he said. “However, through my college experience, I realized that I really do not enjoy reading, and that was going to be a problem if I wanted to be a lawyer. It turns out, though, that there is a lot of money to be gained in the math field, so I doubled down on the math part and am now a Business Analytics and Mathematics double major.”
Gentry, who also runs cross country for MC and is an active set designer and builder for the MC Theatre Department, is working as a data governance intern at FirstBank in Knoxville, where he’s building dashboards for the bank’s various departments to spotlight data errors and refine processes that better serve customers.
“Data governance is a fairly new field, but it’s becoming increasingly more important as the world becomes more informationally and efficiently focused,” he said. “The world, as we know it, revolves around data, and it determines everything from inventory to product rollouts to whether a person decides to eat at your restaurant. Due to this, it’s important that this data is clean, organized and efficiently captured.
“I’ve also been working on product assessments, pulling data related to the products they sell so the bank knows what it is lacking and what it needs to spend more resources on. Additionally, I have been taking a deep dive into data collection related to certain account types, recording where all the information is stored so that no time is wasted scrounging around millions if not billions of lines of data. This ensures that nothing gets lost, and all customers are accounted for because that is what a business is all about, serving their customers and community.”
During his internship, he’s learned such programming languages as SQL, Dax and M, and he’s been given an opportunity to work with such software tools as Azure Database Studio, Power BI and Cognos — all of which are becoming more and more imperative for those working in data fields to understand and develop a competency in. The practicum, he added, has solidified his decision to forego law school for now and dive headfirst into data analysis and organization after he graduates next year.
“My plans are to get a job, get experience from that job for a few years, make some good connections, get an even better job, and we’ll see where the world takes me from there,” he said. “It’s a big world out there, and I am excited to see where things go after Maryville.”
Esther Proctor ’24
Music brought Proctor from Cleveland, Tennessee, to Maryville College, but mathematics led to her calling. Math has been a fascination since childhood, when she knew that it would become her major after she discovered the magic and meaning behind numbers.
“I think a crucial point in time for me was when I finally learned the proof of the quadratic formula,” said Proctor, who also performs as a member of Tartanband and the MC3 Band. “I learned it in a dual enrollment class that I took when I was in high school. The proof felt very meaningful to me because I was finally able to understand why the quadratic formula worked, instead of just blindly trusting it. Since then, my interest in math has consistently grown as I have learned more math.”
At Maryville College, her work with Siopsis led to an introduction with Dr. Juan Restrepo, a regular guest lecturer and a leader of the Mathematics in Computation Section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where employees create the mathematics and architecture-aware algorithms that “harness machines, ideas and data, enabling far-reaching scientific breakthroughs,” according to the website. Through the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships and that connection, Proctor’s cubicle for her summer internship is only 15 feet from Restrepo’s office, she said.
“I have a mentor, Dr. Elaine Wong, who is a combinatorialist who works for the lab,” the Mathematics major added. “She has assigned me to work on a combinatorial problem for the summer. So far, for this project I have studied integer partitions, generating functions, Gaussian Polynomials, roots of unity, unimodality and integer overpartitions.”
With Wong’s guidance, she’s working to prove a conjecture put forth by Jehanne Dousse and Byungchan Kim in their paper, “An Overpartition Analogue of q-binomial Coefficients, II: Combinatorial Proofs and (q,t)-log Concavity,” written in 2017. If their work is successful, they will have proven something that’s never been done before, she added, and the entire experience is allowing her to narrow her career plans, she added, which for the time being include pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics.
“This experience is helping me to realize whether or not I enjoy doing research, and if this line of work is a career path that I would like to pursue,” she said. “I believe this experience is valuable in and of itself, but will also be valuable to me in the future, and will hopefully look attractive to graduate schools. I do not know what exactly I would like to do after I potentially go to graduate school, but I do know that I want to continue learning math, and to use math in my daily life. I am very thankful for the opportunities I have to learn, and I am excited to see what might come next.”
Colby Huffman ’25
As a Sevier County High School standout who was the valedictorian and an all-state soccer player on a state championship team, Huffman could have punched his ticket to just about any college or university. Soccer, education and proximity to family led him to Maryville College, where he’s continued to thrive.
“I have always been interested in science, even as a young boy,” said Huffman, a double major in Mathematics and Biochemistry. “I would drive my parents crazy by asking them why something was working that way or what something is made up of. I have kept that mentality that leads to discoveries and understanding of what is around us, either in biological systems or the molecules around us.”
As part of the S3 program at MC — where he also serves as president of ACS and as a garden intern at Rocky Park Farms in nearby Friendsville, Tennessee — his innate curiosity has been met not just with answers, but the tools with which to find them himself. Professional connections opened up job-shadowing and internship opportunities, he said, and the ability to take advantage of assistance in the College’s STEM Success Center has allowed him to maintain the academic pace necessary to succeed in two equally challenging majors.
In addition to completing work as a Ledford Scholar over the summer, Huffman is part of a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) cohort at The Ohio State University, where he’s working in the Lindert Research Group, specifically on the molecular dynamics side of the laboratory.
“This basically means we are trying to model on a computer how proteins vibrate/move/rotate and form bonds,” he said. “There are millions upon millions of atoms and different functional groups that molecules can consist of, and they’re all in various arrangements and have different effects, so that requires me and the lab to have to generate the force field by hand or parameterize by using software.”
The opportunity to work at OSU, he added, came with a significant learning curve because the school is an R1 doctoral university, meaning that research activity is vast, ongoing, and far larger than what he’s used to as part of his MC STEM work. However, he added, the foundations laid at Maryville College have served him well.
“Maryville prepared me to do the work, but MC doesn’t have the computational ability, so I had zero exposure except that I knew it existed from conversations with professors,” he said. “However, despite the unfamiliarity, I picked up on it very quickly and have been ahead of schedule since I have been here. I also have used different skills from Maryville; specifically in my work, I have used a lot of what Dr. (Nathan) Duncan taught in Organic Chemistry.”
Carmela Lewis ’24
A graduate of Maryville High School, Lewis is spending her summer in the mountains — specifically, hunting flowers.
The grandchild of the late Dr. Wallace “Wally” Lewis, who taught history at MC for more than three decades, Lewis found her way to science almost by accident. Art and veterinary science were early interests, but then a retiring high school teacher gave her a poster on animal and plant genetics, and she spent the next summer deep-diving into the information on it.
At MC, she joined ACS/Tri-Beta, and her relationships with professors like Gibson and Dr. Dave Unger, associate professor of biology, “changed my life,” she said.
“I remember coming in wanting to do stuff with genetics, but then I took the class and realized it wasn’t necessarily for me,” she said. “I took the plant biology class and the ecology class and loved them both, but I had no idea what to do for my Senior Study, but then Dr. Unger said, ‘What do you think about wildflowers?’”
Unger proposed a unique summer project funded by the FIPSE grant: An ecological survey of wildflowers growing in Townsend, Tennessee, a small Blount County town that borders the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Upon investigation, Lewis realized that information about wildflowers in the area hadn’t been updated in more than a decade, and so she set out to wed her Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping training, taken last summer, with her scientific skills, surveying the private mountain property of a College partner.
“I go out twice a week for about four hours at a time with GPS, my camera and my notebook, and every single flower I come across, I sit down and identify and collect data points, then move a little farther down the trail,” she said. “I do a bunch of hands-on work every week for eight hours, and then I upload the information to an Excel spreadsheet and put it into a file to use with my map-making software. My goal is to make a little booklet where all the flowers in the area are, what they are, and where they can be found.”
Using roughly 900 data points, she’s cataloged 82 different species so far, everything from Dutchman’s breeches to spring beauties, from ghost pipes to common violets. She’s often accompanied by Olive, her German shepherd mix, who frolics in the creek while she tabulates her findings, she said.
“I’ve always loved biology, and I knew after my first year I wanted to work with something living,” she said. “Now, I’m definitely on the plant track, and I haven’t had to only focus on the science. I’m thinking about how I want to create my booklet, about including flower symbolism, about the cultural and historical uses of these flowers and what feelings have been associated with them throughout history. I get to sort of piece everything together, and it’s changed everything.”
Meadow Van Skyhawk ’25
A Maryville native working toward a degree in Biochemistry on a pre-veterinary track, Van Skyhawk was inspired to pursue science thanks to some MC alumni whose classes she had at Maryville High School.
“My best subjects in school were always math and science, so I knew I wanted to pursue a career in a STEM-related field,” she said. “Although I was interested in all areas of science, the world of animals always caught my eye. Anytime we had to take our animals to the vet, I tagged along to watch and learn from the veterinarians and the vet techs.”
The S3 summer program, which brings new first-year students to campus two weeks early to establish an MC STEM foundation and get to know faculty and the College, introduced her to Gibson, whom she considers a mentor. Gibson, in fact, recommended a summer internship at Blackford Vet Surgery Referral in nearby Knoxville.
“As a veterinary assistant at Blackford Vet Surgery Referral, I help both the veterinarians and the vet techs,” Van Skyhawk said. “When I get there in the morning, I set up all three of the operating rooms to prepare them for the surgeries later that day, then I fill prescriptions and assist in the pre-operation care for the animals. I help the vet techs get their patients into the operating room, then I scrub into surgery.
“I assist Dr. Callie Blackford ’19 (who, as a student, inspired the creation of the College’s Pre-Veterinary track, according to Gibson) in her surgeries by setting up her equipment and helping with anything she needs during the surgery. I also scrub into surgery with Dr. LeeAnn Blackford and help her with anything she needs. I also help with post-operation care and cleaning up the clinic at the end of the day.”
The role has expanded her knowledge and increased her confidence in her career track, she added, and has given her tools she’ll bring with her back to MC in the fall: stress management, for one, given the often-challenging nature of the work in Biochemistry, she said, while juggling a position on the MC Cheerleading squad and membership in ACS/Tri-Beta.
“After Maryville College, I want to go to vet school at the University of Tennessee, where I can pursue my dream of being a veterinarian,” she said. “The skills I’m learning at the clinic will benefit me immensely in my journey to vet school, as I’m learning the proper way to care for animals by amazing veterinarians and vet techs.”
Grady Cash ’24
A native of Jonesborough, Tennessee, and a member of the MC Scots baseball team, Cash transferred to MC from King University, following a friend who did the same. A nursing student at King, he enrolled in Biochemistry at Maryville College. Science, he added, has long been an interest — he remembers a “mad scientist”-themed birthday party as a child — but over time, he’s developed a greater interest in anatomy and health-related science fields.
“The Biochemistry program at Maryville is, as you might expect, extremely difficult — but although it’s hard, it has taught me study skills that I use not only at Maryville, but also will in my graduate studies,” he said.
Over the summer, Cash is working as a CNA (certified nursing assistant) at Franklin Woods Community Hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee. It’s a family affair — his mom, who helped him get the job, is a registered nurse on the same floor, and he’s getting the opportunity to serve patients as well as obtain clinical hours required to pursue graduate work as a physician’s assistant.
“The services I provide are helping patients to and from the bathroom, giving baths to people who are unable to bathe themselves, and also providing emotional support to people, because sometimes that’s all someone needs, because the ICU is definitely not somewhere people want to be,” he said. “I’ve done this same job at a different hospital in the past, and I think it’s one everyone should have to at least once in their lives. It really teaches you how to respect people.”
That respect, he added, is something that will serve him well — as a baseball player, as a McGill Scholar, as a member of S3, but most importantly as a future healthcare provider.
“It really helps you understand the stress and how busy it can get, and how difficult it can be standing 12 hours straight,” he added.
Kaitlin Koster ’25
Originally from Hendersonville, Tennessee, Koster happened upon MC when seeking out a school close to the Smoky Mountains that offered a robust science program. A McGill Scholar, S3 member and Biology major, she comes by her love of science naturally — her father, Kevin, is a biology teacher, and she grew up with a healthy curiosity about the natural world, she said.
“When I was little, this manifested in spending as much time as possible outdoors, catching crawdads, finding salamanders, and collecting sticks and rocks that looked cool,” she said. “As I got older, this love of science morphed into more of a pre-med route, but after my first bio class at MC I knew pre-med was not the right path for me. So I did a reroute and found myself back where I started: outdoors. And here we are!”
“Here we are” is part of an REU at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, where she and another student are working on a project titled “Population Ecology of a Threatened Fish, Mooneye.” It’s an exciting opportunity, she said, that builds on the foundation that S3 gave her through both programming and faculty support.
“The Mooneye is this gorgeous silvery fish and a hiodon (meaning it has a bony tongue) that has not been very widely researched and is threatened in New York,” she said. “Our goal with this research is to create a species distribution model, which basically takes different environmental factors and observation data and stacks them on top of each other to predict the habitat of the species through GIS-based analysis.
“Our study is focused solely on the Oswegatchie River, but with this model, we could predict populations of Mooneye in locations other than our study area. This would in turn allow for the conservation bit to come in, and a species management plan could be implemented in order to preserve these populations.”
Her work, she added, includes electrofishing: sending electric shocks into the water that momentarily stun the creatures so they can be briefly handled and studied before being returned to the water.
“We have an electrofishing research vessel that we fish from, and we go out about 3 times a week to different locations in our study area,” she said. “We keep a close and accurate count of any fish that we see in order to look at relative abundance and process any Mooneye we find. Processing these Mooneye involves taking their length, weight, gender, fin and scale samples, and implanting a PIT (passive integrated transponder) tag so that we know if we recapture them in the future.
“The end goal of this project, in its most basic form, is to learn more about this fish in order to preserve it and prevent the population from becoming even more sparse than it already is. It is so gratifying to be involved in this REU, as I am gaining incredibly valuable experience in the world of research as well as in the field of conservation biology.”
It is, she pointed out, a “boots-on-the-ground” type of experience that excites the salamander-pursuing girl she was, and the budding scientist she’s becoming. That, she added, will give her additional knowledge and experience that she’ll bring back to MC this fall, where she’ll continue to work for Mountain Challenge, the College’s on-campus adventure partner, and serve as one of the student-leaders of Tri-Beta.
“I am getting real experience in fieldwork, coming up with my own hypothesis, collecting my own data, processing my own results, and really getting a taste of what my future could potentially look like,” said Koster, who hopes to build a career in the fields of wildlife biology or conservation ecology. “I will definitely bring this practical experience back to MC with me, and I will hopefully be able to apply it in the classroom, during my senior study, and in my future career.”