The Department of Biology is offering 6-week-long summer research internships for High School Teachers who are teaching full-time in the greater Boston area. This program is an opportunity for local science teachers to spend six weeks in a research lab at MIT working on real-life projects and honing skills to bring back to the classroom.

The program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, provides a generous stipend, and professional development points. Teacher-interns are required to write a 5-page summary of their research at the end of the summer and present a poster of their work.

Interested teachers should fill out the application form and mail with an updated CV and cover letter to Dr. Mandana Sassanfar (see form for address). The cover letter should describe briefly how the summer internship will benefit the teacher and his/her students, and concrete plans to bring some of the knowledge acquired during the summer internship back to the classroom.

Amanda Hartman of Somerville High School was the 2007 intern. She had this to say about her experience: "I was privileged to receive the HHMI Summer Teacher Internship for this summer. For the past 6 weeks, I have been working in Dr. Littleton's fly lab at the Picower Institute. It has been an excellent and invaluable experience. I have been working closely with one of his graduate students, Sarah Huntwork, as she uses fruit flies to investigate the structure of a protein involved in synaptic vesicle fusion (in other words, how this protein exactly helped out with getting messages from one brain cell to another). I feel very fortunate to have had this glimpse of a scientist's daily life: a lot of brainpower and collaboration going into the projects, followed by days of 'grunt work', with occasional checking in and problem-solving along the way, and eventually, hopefully, some positive results."

Amanda Hartman, science teacher at Somerville HS, at the bench in the Littleton Lab