Nearly 20 years ago, Anthony Oro found a mentor—and a career—in a Stanford biology lab. He arrived on the Farm thinking he would major in chemical engineering. But after answering an ad in the undergraduate research opportunities office, he ended up studying the gene mutations of maize corn in the lab of biological sciences professor Virginia Walbot. Inspired by Walbot, ’67, and her work, Oro entered a program that trains doctors to be both clinicians and laboratory researchers.
Today, as an assistant professor of dermatology, Oro is providing the same sort of inspiration to another generation of Stanford undergraduates. In his lab, junior Jamie Hui is working on sequencing a gene, trying to figure out whether it is involved in growing basal cell carcinoma. She says Oro and others on the research team have helped her learn to handle delicate DNA samples and taught her that research often involves mistakes. “Undergraduate biology classes involve lots of memorization,” Hui says. “In research you have so many questions, and there is never an answer right in front of you. You have to take all these indirect pathways to figure out what is right.”
Hui is one of hundreds of beneficiaries of the recently expanded and renamed undergraduate research programs. When its predecessor began in 1974, Laura Selznick ran it alone, posting openings on a bulletin board in the basement of Old Union. In 1985—Oro’s senior year—the office provided $74,000 in grants to 54 students. Last year, the beefed-up programs awarded $724,000 to 433 students, according to Selznick, MA ’75, who is now associate director.
Administrators see research as a way to continue undergraduates’ exposure to senior faculty, which often begins in freshman and sophomore seminars. Last year, the office expanded both in size—it now boasts a staff of seven—and in focus. Instead of just providing students with grants and information on how to contact faculty, the program now encourages departments and individual professors to design research projects suitable for undergraduate participation. During the 2000-01 academic year, the office gave $1.3 million for programs involving 450 students, according to director Susie Brubaker-Cole.
Offering grant money to faculty, Brubaker-Cole says, benefits both professor and student. Faculty gain a fresh voice asking challenging questions—and sometimes making major breakthroughs. And the faculty-led projects make getting started easier for students. “Sometimes students don’t have entrepreneurial spirit yet or an understanding of what it means to do research,” says Brubaker-Cole. “This is putting the initiative into faculty and department hands.”
Research also pushes students to use creative skills that may not get tested during class. One, Anne-Marie McReynolds, ’99, put together a photography exhibit showing the social connections the Harlem YMCA fosters among blacks in New York City. Another, junior Terence Chia, helped develop a fluorescence catheter that may be used to detect plaque in arteries or cancer cells in intestines. Desperate for a visual aid the night before a presentation, he obtained a sausage from the Florence Moore dining hall, drilled a hole in it and fashioned it into a makeshift artery.
Chia pursued his work through the Summer Research College, in which 165 students live together in a dorm while working on University-funded projects. He calls the college a “very horizon-broadening experience. During the day you go to the lab and do research. You come back and talk to people who have diverse interests and are very passionate about them,” he says. “You can see how people could devote themselves to any given field based on what they thought and what they felt was important.” Even sausage making.
