WAIMEA — Twenty-six high school and college students conducted cancer research alongside doctors at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center this summer as part of a two-month internship. One of them was Sidney Vermeulen, who started her senior year at Hawaii Preparatory Academy earlier this week.
“I knew that I really wanted to go into research so I started looking for things online last spring and found this opportunity,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity as a high school student to learn more about science and see what it would be like in the workforce. Science is my favorite subject, especially biology and chemistry, and I like research because it gives you the ability to discover something new.”
Vermeulen found the internship rewarding.
“To me, it is exciting to see results,” she said. “This experience exposed me to a lot of different types of research and researchers, with weekly seminars given by primary investigators in fields as diverse as clinical trials, or translational bioinformatics, or physical activity intervention.”
While a freshman at HPA, Vermeulen first became interested in biology in Stephanie McDowell’s class. During the internship, her two mentors were Dr. Gertraud Maskarinec and Dr. Yurii Shvetsov, both in the epidemiology program.
“The main project was a study on the relationship between diet quality and adiposity that looks at whether eating a good quality diet, regardless of how much you eat, affects where fat is stored,” she said. “The preliminary analysis showed that diet quality is strongly related to visceral fat and the presence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which can eventually progress to fibrosis, cirrhosis and even heptacellular carcinoma, or liver cancer.”
Vermeulen gained firsthand experience by helping to make tables and graphs, and write some of a paper on the subject.
“These findings surprised me because I didn’t realize how important diet was in the development in diseases like cancer. I always thought that if you got all the essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals, what you eat didn’t really matter, yet this study seems to suggest the opposite,” she said.
Vermeulen also got a taste of what a career in research requires.
“I really learned persistence,” she said. “Things kept changing so we had to do them over and over again. I never realized it could take two the whole two months to do something that seemed really simple.”
In another program, Vermeulen learned the basics on how to use a statistical analysis program for breast cancer prediction models.
An HPA day student from Kona, she knew by her final research presentation on Aug. 5 that she wanted to pursue a career in cancer research. Vermeulen agrees that devoting most of her summer to the internship was well worth the time and effort.
“This is the first step in my career path. I’m now looking for colleges that have undergraduate research programs,” she said. “This is a way I can make a difference with this devastating disease. I really want to go into something I feel is meaningful for the rest of my life.”