By Yahya Chaudhry
As a junior at Brighton High School in 2022, Roshaun Knight was unsure about his plans after graduation. An ambitious student, Knight had always wanted to go to college but had been putting off the application process, until he participated in the inaugural Harvard Chemistry High School Laboratory Skills (HSLS) summer internship program.
“Working with professors during the internship and working with other students confirmed to me that college is something I wanted to do,” Knight said. “It gave me the sense that I got to try and be more hands on [with college].”
On January 10, former interns of the first HSLS program, Knight and Damilyis Gonzalez, reunited at Harvard with their mentors to consider the impact their work – hands-on, collaborative research and experimentation in a Harvard chemistry lab – has already had on their careers. Since their internships, Knight and Gonzalez were accepted at and enrolled in UMass Boston, and they credit HSLS for motivating them to pursue higher education.
The internship program, a partnership between the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB) and the Harvard Ed Portal, paired local high school students with faculty labs and graduate student mentors. These mentors provided guidance and instruction as the high schoolers delved into experiments, read scientific papers, and experienced the world of scientific research firsthand. The program aims to provide an experiential learning experience for interns to improve their science literacy, expose them to careers in the sciences, and equip them with basic life science, laboratory, and workforce skills.
One of the motivations for establishing HSLS was to increase the numbers of underrepresented students in chemistry and chemical biology. “Our department is incredibly focused on addressing diversity within our community and within higher education,” said Deana Reardon, Executive Director of CCB. “This focus is about more than just addressing pipeline and recruiting issues, but on making this a community where people want to stay and creating environments that enable everyone to do their best work.”
CCB’s partnership with the Ed Portal on this program began in the spring of 2022, when CCB graduate students taught weekly classes on science literacy and laboratory skills at the Harvard Ed Portal for a group of Brighton High School students nominated by their teachers. At the end of the semester, the interns showcased their acquired skills in front of high school science teachers and guests from CCB before they were assigned to a faculty lab. Knight was paired with graduate student Grant Stec in the lab of Professor Jarad Mason, while Gonzalez was paired with Ivan Arvizo and Claire Casaday in the lab of Professor Theodore Betley.
Structured to benefit both interns and lab staff, the program enables graduate students to communicate their research, connect with the next generation of scientists, and get an extra pair of hands in the lab.
“For the high schooler, the internship’s goal was to provide STEM skills and an opportunity to interact with students in the research group and to get excited about what university science is like,” Mason said. “The mentors get a valuable opportunity to do some hands-on training, mentoring of the high school students, and communicating at a level that is accessible to teach lab skills.”
Working on developing atomically precise silver chalcogenide nanoclusters, Knight shadowed Stec as they setup various reactions, optimized synthesis, and identified undiscovered nanoparticles through X-ray crystallography. Under Grant’s supervision, Knight set up many of the reactions on his own, and he eventually became proficient in performing these reactions without any assistance.
“The level of research was super advanced, but Grant did a really good job of explaining so I’d get a better understanding of the lab work,” Knight said. “Everyone did a great job of supporting me and making me feel like I belonged from the first day.”
Knight's work played a significant role in Stec's doctoral dissertation and led to multiple manuscripts currently in the pipeline for academic publication.
“For me, it was a tremendously rewarding experience to see Roshaun become increasingly curious about scientific research and confident in his abilities in the lab,” Stec said. “Roshaun also conducted himself in the lab with a very high standard of professionalism which will be invaluable in his future endeavors.”
Working in the field of inorganic chemistry, Gonzalez studied the reactivity of metal complexes for iron with Arvizo’s guidance. Gonzalez got significant hands-on experience doing reactions inside of a glovebox using very fine, synthetic techniques.
“I had never been in a chemistry research lab before,” Gonzalez said. “From the very first day, Ivan explained everything clearly to me and made it fun.
As native Spanish speakers, both Arvizo and Gonzalez had the opportunity to communicate about chemistry in new way, by breaking down concepts across languages.
“The lab was discussing chemistry theory in English, while I grew up studying it in Spanish,” said Gonzalez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. “Ivan and I would go back and forth between Spanish and English while we worked and translated the terms so we could conduct research.”
Working together, Gonzalez and Arvizo were able to better grasp the building blocks of chemistry in an accessible way.
“Translating and explaining advanced chemistry theories into simpler understandable concepts really helped me as a first-year graduate student” Arvizo said. “Communicating the science and relearning it in another language was very gratifying.”
Knight and Gonzalez are excited about staying connected with their mentors and using the skills they learned at HSLS in the future.
See pictures below:
Damilyis Gonzalez, (from left), Ivan Arvizo, Grant Stec, and Roshaun Knight.
Damilyis Gonzalez and Ivan Arvizo,
Grant Stec and Roshaun Knight.
Ivan Arvizo
Grant Stec
