For five weeks this summer, we had Chris and Fatoumata, students from Boston Public Schools, working with our lab group as summer research interns through a collaboration with , a "non-profit organization that aims to uplift historically underrepresented communities by delivering transformative STEAM programs to close the education gap." During their time with us, they worked three days a week in the lab on research on optimizing fermentation of xylitol using yeast. They learned a lot of new lab skills, ran a fermentation experiment, analyzed their fermentation samples for pH, OD600 (cell growth), and xylose and xylitol concentration using HPLC. They analyzed and presented the data in a poster session with the other STEAM Ahead students! We are really proud of both of them.
