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Apprentices from years past
City Honors junior earns slot at international science fair
By Deidre Williams
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Jimmitti Teysir is a “born scientist.”
Her mother is a nurse, and her father works for a pharmaceutical company.
Her eyes light up when she talks about the evolution of the genetic code.
She gets animated, and her hands start gesturing, when she explains the characteristics of a super family of enzymes in layman’s terms.
Jimmitti will be presenting her work at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Reno , Nev. , which runs May 10 through 15.
The high school junior will be the first City Honors student ever chosen to compete in the prestigious science, math and engineering competition, even though students from the school’s science research program have been trying to get to the fair for almost 15 years, officials said.
“I’m nervous. I have the opportunity to represent the school, and I feel very grateful to go. I want to do good,” Jimmitti said.
Her presentation at the fair involves evidence that supports the existence of a subset of a genetic code in soil bacteria that’s millions of years old. She examines its genome and shows how it uses a reduced subset of a standard genetic code.
“She is a born scientist. She has a genuine inquisitive mind,” said Dr. William Druax, a research scientist at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute on Ellicott Street .
HWI, as it is called, runs a research training program for 10 schools in the Buffalo area, including City Honors. Students get to work one-on-one with trained scientists at HWI two days a week after school and all day Fridays in a lab setting.
Located in the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the institute has a team of more than 75 members who study the causes of disease at their fundamental molecular level, as well as potential therapies.
Students in the program, including Jimmitti, have been studying bioinformatics technology to analyze protein families and to learn how to interpret data.
“We did a computer analysis and learned to use databases online, and then from there developed programs to process the data,” said Jimmitti, who has a freshman brother at City Honors and a 6-year-old sister.
Jimmitti thinks maybe she will go into medicine as a career, but one thing is for sure, her profession will use science, she said. Her parents both have careers involving medicine and science.
“I’ve always liked science and biology for that reason,” she said, adding that she does not see herself going into bioinformatics as a career.
“This is behind the scenes now. I’ll probably want a career in the medical field to use what they learn behind the scenes,” said Jimmitti, the fourth student trained at HWI to compete in the international fair. Previous HWI students include Gabriel Ortiz, who was a 1992 finalist, and Sankha Basu, who in 1999 was a semifinalist. Michael Wong also competed in the competition when it was known as the Westinghouse Science Fair.
The International Science and Engineering Fair is the world’s largest international precollege science competition exclusively for students in grades 9 through 12, said local research scientists. About 1,600 students will come from more than 50 countries to compete for $4 million in awards and scholarships.
“It’s a great resource,” Jimmitti said. “The judges have high degrees of knowledge, so you are pretty much guaranteed good feedback.”
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