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Elizabeth Garfinkle

Wednesday, 23 June 2010

Elizabeth Garfinkle is our most recent cool kid, but with her internship at the Santa Barbra Museum of Natural History she sounds like she is already a cool scientist! She is only a sophomore in high school but she already knows how to use a Scanning Electron Microscope and is writing her own scientific paper!

What is it like to volunteer at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (SBMNH)? What is your favorite part of having this experience?
Volunteering at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is great. Every time I go to work there is something or someone new and exciting for me to work with. The biggest challenge is to make sure everything I do is absolutely correct because it eventually goes into the museum�s collections for display and research. It is also great working with world-class invertebrate zoologists. I get to meet their friends who are authors and researchers from all over the world, and also get invited to many scientist-only events. Best of all I get the opportunity to work with the scientists and learn from them.

You do lots of different things for the museum! What work do you do with the museum�s scientific journals? Have you read some of the articles? If so, have you found any particularly interesting?
One of my jobs at the museum is to sort through boxes of the museum�s scientific journals. I try to find duplicates and set those aside to be sent to Mexico where they don�t have as many scientific journals. This is important because it allows other countries to learn and do research they might not otherwise be able to do because they don�t have the resources. I have read some of the articles, but one in particular was the most interesting. It was written in the 1800�s and is about stories and myths of killer octopus. It included drawings of shipwrecks and fisherman being pulled into the water by giant killer octopus. Today, we know that killer octopus don�t exist, but it was interesting to see what they thought about them in the 1800�s!

What about the work you do with the shell collection and why is it important?
Another one of my jobs at the museum is to take shell collections given to the museum and transfer them into custom vials that fit into the museums collection room. This is important because the shells that the museum gets from the public are usually rare and a lifetime of work. So by transferring them into vials, it insures that the shells will be protected and used for research instead of just sitting in the boxes they come in.

You are also working on your own scientific paper! What will it be about? What research did you do in order to write about this topic?
My most interesting project at the museum is writing my own scientific paper that I hope to publish in the summer of 2010. My paper is about a specific shell called Sinezona rimuloides. It is a micro shell, so when looked at with the naked eye it looks like a grain of sand. But when put under a scanning electron microscope (SEM) you can see all of the details of the shell, even down to each grain of dirt. I spent one year training with the SEM expert and am now almost an independent user of the SEM. These pictures of the shells tell me the similarities and differences between shells from different locations but in the same genus. This is important to publish because other scientists can read my results and research them further to get a better understanding of these particular shells, and micro shells in general.

That�s a lot of very impressive work to take on in high school! What do you like to do in your free time?
I enjoy tide pooling with the museum, my school, and my family. Outside of my internship at the SBMNH I enjoy playing baseball and guitar, creating 3-D art, and meeting famous people like Bill Nye the Science Guy and Buzz Aldrin�and of course doing anything science. I am also a Senior Girl Scout and have been in Girl Scouts since the first grade and am currently working on my Gold Award.

That sounds like a great experience! What exactly is the Girl Scout Gold Award and what are you doing in order to receive yours?
The Gold Award is equivalent to a Boy Scout Eagle Scout Award. In order to get this award, you have to complete a series of interest patches that relate to your final project. Then you have to plan out your project, get an advisor, and estimate the overall cost. Once your application is accepted, you have to work on the project for about 50 hours and make sure that your final project is going to be ongoing in the future. For my Girl Scout Gold Award project, I plan to create a lesson plan around a science kit and then teach it to my school's middle school science class.

That sounds like a wonderful thing to do to encourage other kids to enjoy science as much as you do! With all of this experience, what are your plans for the future?
My future plans are to attend California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo and study microbiology. Then I plan to work at St. Jude Children�s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. It would be my dream job to be a microbiologist who finds the cure to cancer!

That�s a very inspiring dream! Its so important for everyone to have big dreams, so that together we can make big things happen! Finally, why do you love the ocean? What is your favorite ocean animal?
I love the ocean because it contains so many different varieties of marine life, from giant whales to cephalopods to plankton. My favorite marine animal is a sea jelly or jelly fish because they are unlike any animal on land and look so delicate yet they can give you a nasty shock. My favorite ocean experience has been night snorkeling on Catalina Island because you get to see all of the marine life at night and get to participate in bioluminescence.