In Honor of JJ: The JJ Vance Memorial Summer Internship
Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance and Dr. Jeffery Vance created a research-oriented internship for Miami and Broward high school students to honor the memory of their son, JJ.
How do you turn a nightmare into a dream?
After 14-year-old JJ Vance passed away from a blood clot in December of 1998, his parents sought to channel their grief into something meaningful. Researchers at Duke University at the time, Margaret Pericak-Vance, Ph.D., and Jeffery Vance, M.D., Ph.D., thought their way through the unthinkable to establish an internship program at Duke for smart, inquisitive high school students like JJ.
When the Vances moved to the University of Miami, they brought the program with them. Today, the JJ Vance Memorial Summer Internship in the biological and computational sciences is an eight-week summer internship awarded to rising seniors from Miami and Broward-area high schools. The popular program is currently funded by an NIH/NINDS grant. Previous supporters included the McKnight Foundation as well as private individuals.
“It’s a different kind of internship,” said Dr. Vance, professor and founding chair of the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation of Department of Human Genetics and director of the Genomic Education and Outreach Center at the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
A Summer of Real Science and Research
Rather than spending a summer sitting in a classroom, JJ Vance interns are embedded in NIH research, working side-by-side with postdocs, senior technicians and faculty members.
“The goal is to let kids understand the importance of science and research,” said Dr. Vance, “to show them that they can do it. Passion for research and science comes from actually becoming involved, having a hands-on experience.”
This year the program had more than 100 applications for 12 positions.
“We look for diamonds in the rough,” said Dr. Vance, “kids with the drive and the talent but who haven’t had the opportunities.”
The internships are paid. This is key for students who face economic hardship and need to earn money in the summer. Of the 172 students who have gone through the program, more than 99% continued to college, most in STEM fields.
It’s no coincidence that family and friends describe JJ as driven and talented, too.
“He was people-oriented,” said Dr. Pericak-Vance, the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Professor of Human Genetics and director of the Hussman Institute at the Miller School. “He had real empathy. He understood when you were upset.”
After JJ passed away, his family received more than 300 letters and heard story after story they hadn’t heard before, like how he took it upon himself to sit with a Japanese exchange student who hadn’t yet made any friends and how he befriended a girl who was being bullied.
“She told us how much it meant to her to have him walk her to school and sit by her side,” Dr. Pericak-Vance said.
“JJ was very knowledgeable,” said his sister, Danica Vance, M.D., assistant professor and director of sports medicine at Columbia University and Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. “He liked science and math.”
He was also competitive, she said. “We competed with each other. We battled in sports and video games. That was always fun. And he was protective, he stood up for me.”
Getting Young People Embedded in the Work
Anthony Griswold, Ph.D., associate professor of human genetics at the Miller School, has been a mentor in the program since he arrived at UM as a postdoctoral fellow in 2009.
“There were four students that first year. Young people with no experience working in a lab, but with ambition to learn more about what it means to be a scientist,” Dr. Griswold said, adding that he’s mentored an intern every summer since.
Dr. Griswold, who has a coffee cup that says, ironically, “Fill This, Intern,” knows JJ Vance interns perform tasks not usually considered intern roles.
“The program is meant to get them involved, not just exposed,” he said. “It’s not shadowing but understanding what the day-to-day world looks like for a scientist.”
Dr. Griswold mentioned two challenges to mentoring JJ Vance interns. For people who are mentoring for the first time, letting go and letting the students blossom can be tough. Second, the lab work is inherently complex, and it becomes more complex over time. The data are bigger, the sample sizes are larger and there can be a learning curve. As projects grow in complexity, the ramp-up time grows.
“These kids rise to the challenge, as they have every year for the 15 years I’ve been involved in the program,” Dr. Griswold said.
Internship Can Lead to Careers in Science
Nalini Rao, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, was a JJ Vance intern in 2012. She returned to work at the Hussman Institute as an undergraduate. As an intern, Dr. Rao used transgenic mouse models to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying Charcot-Marie Tooth disease in humans.
“My project was to look in the spinal cords of mice,” she said, “and determine the thickness of the myelination of motor neurons, which is crucial for conducting electrical signals.”
Indeed, JJ Vance interns do more than make coffee runs. They help run actual research.
Later, as a Ph.D. candidate, Dr. Rao often reminded herself of how excited she was during this program as she fostered that excitement in her students.
“What surprises me,” she said, “is how much they can pick up in a fast period of time, if you let them.”
Bowman Brown, M.S., is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, studying artificial intelligence applications to biology and medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brown was a JJ Vance intern in 2012, then returned for two summers as a lab assistant.
“I worked on the computational biology end of things, programming for analysis,” he said.
During that first summer, he developed a program to help identify one potential gene of interest that had a tangible impact on the research at the Hussman Institute.
“It was the first time I had a chance to apply my programming skills to a real problem and it was exciting to know that I might have made a contribution to an important area of research, ” he said.
The internship, he said, “was an introduction to research, which was really cool. A lot of people don’t get to have that. It inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on biomedical informatics.”
“I spent my first 13 years with JJ,” said Dr. Danica Vance. “Even though he’s not here, he lives on through us and through this internship, which has changed a lot of other kids’ lives. Whatever he’d be doing today, I think it would be something to help people. He’s doing that even though he’s not with us.”
Tags: Dr. Jeffery Vance, Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics, Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance, John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics, medical education, student research