High school students go HYRS
Written By: Stephen Osadetz
2003-07-16
; "Nick Kalogirou")
In the basement of the University of Alberta Hospital, down long, gray-white hallways and past imposing signs declaring "Restricted Access", you can find high-school student Nick Kalogirou working diligently on a bioengineering research project. Rather than spending his summer dallying in the sunshine as any average kid his age would like to, Kalogirou will spend six weeks, three quarters of his vacation, helping a U of A research team investigate Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology.Kalogiru's participation in the project is funded through the Heritage Youth Researcher Summer (HYRS) program of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research. Nineteen high-school students like Kalogirou are working at the U of A this summer as part of the program, which is in its fourth year.
Working in the lab of U of A biomedical engineer Dr. Christian Beaulieu and under the supervision of a masters student, Rob Stobbe, Kalogirou is building a special cylinder which can be placed around a person's head when they are having an MRI, so as to get a picture of the amount of sodium in his or her brain.
"When a person has a stroke," Kalogirou says, "certain cells don't get enough ATP [the cell's energy-supplier], so the sodium/potassium pumps don't work, which causes a buildup of sodium in the cells. If you can detect that inside the brain, you can determine how long ago a person has had a stroke."
Stobbe is happy to have Kalogirou around to help. "He's brilliant--really, pretty phenomenal." Stobbe says of the International Baccalaureate student from St. Albert.
Kalogirou's HYRS placement is a perfect fit for his talents. Kalogirou, whose father is an electronics engineer, has always had above-par electronics skills, even before he started the HYRS program, which began less than two weeks ago. In his spare time, Kalogirou, who also wants to be an engineer, sits down in his basement at a workbench that he shares with his father and builds circuits. He's nonchalant about his skills, as though every high-school student were an electronics pro. "We just do stuff around the house--I don't know. My Dad and I built our own alarm system for the house."
"I applied for biomedical engineering through HYRS, but I had no idea that my placement would be such a good combination of my electronics background with health research and the engineering I want to do," he says.
The university research environment is a welcome change from school, he says, as it combines the freedom he enjoys working in his basement with a more pertinent application in health research. In high school, though, he says, "It's way different. There's so much structure, and everything is laid out for you with strict hours and deadlines."
The labs at school have set answers, which is not real research, he says. "But here, we're not so sure of the result. That's why we're here--we're doing real research and experimentation."
This article originally appeared in ExpressNews