Science Department awards annual grant

When the new Estelle Siebens Science Center opened five years ago, BVU set out to help their science students learn and grow in their major with a special grant called the BVU Science Grant.

According to Assistant Professor of Biology Dr. Brian Lenzmeier, this program "provides a $3,000 stipend for two BVU science students to carry out research for eight weeks during the summer under the supervision of a BVU full time faculty member," Lenzmeier said.

Funding for this grant comes out of the School of Science Endowment and at the end of the summer the students who go through this summer program must write a formal research paper of their findings and present their project at the Iowa Academy of Sciences and at BVU Scholars Day the following spring semester.

Students choose what their research topic will be. The grant funds experiments in all areas of science including biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, environmental science, and mathematics as long as they are supported by a faculty member. Two past recipients of this grant, sophomore Grant Turner and senior Kyle Glienke, worked on two very different topics.

"I based my research on determining the effects of an anesthetic, propofol, on the choloride levels in the mouse hippocampus," Turner said.

On the other hand, Glienke "worked on looking at chloride concentrations within neurons of the cerebellum using the confocal microscope. It was an extension of the research I was doing as part of my biology degree," Glienke said.

The two winners this year are junior Cali Reiling whose research topic is "Proline's effect on the enzymatic activity of catalase and peroxidase" and sophomore Michael Dirkx who will be researching "The roles of the amino acid proline and the Put3 protein in responding to reactive oxygen species."

"This year, one of the proposals that was funded was a biochemistry project and the other proposal that was funded was a cell biology project," Lenzmeier said.

The students are chosen thorough an application process and have to have a BVU School of Science faculty member who is willing to be a mentor for the student over the summer.

In order to be chosen, the students must create a formal research proposal which has an introduction, hypothesis, an experimental design section, and a summary of materials they will need to conduct their experiment.

These proposals are around four to five pages long and are reviewed by the School of Science faculty members who are not sponsoring any of the experiments and are ranked by the quality of the proposal and experimental design. The students who are ranked in the top two are the ones who have the opportunity to stay and conduct their research.

"The past two years have seen five applicants each year with two proposals funded each year," Lenzmeier said.

Overall, this BVU Science Grant gives students the opportunity to work with their field of interest in a way in which most undergraduate students wouldn't even be able to fathom.

"Not many other institutions of this size have such an amazing science program and all of the expensive equipment we do, so it is exciting to stay here and learn more about your home institution rather than traveling all over to learn more," Turner said.