Published: September 2008, The Post, UF Health 
 

When most 12-year-olds were doing their homework or playing pickup games of basketball with their friends, Dennis McLeod was in a lab surrounded by white coats and microscopes.
 

With a nudge from his mother, McLeod participated in research opportunities annually and today boasts a rich resume with experience in labs across the United States and Canada. Now 23, McLeod, who graduated in May with degrees in biology and Spanish from Morehouse College in Atlanta, is proof that early exposure to science can mold a child’s career path. But he said he knows there are kids who are not so lucky.
 

“I think we need more programs only geared toward students with zero research experience,” he said. “I can give you a list of 100 kids today who can’t get that experience.”
 

Researchers at the UF College of Medicine are trying to change that. This summer, McLeod and more than a dozen premedical and graduate school-bound students from universities across the country participated in UF’s National Institutes of Health Summer Research Program, a program aimed primarily at undergraduate minority students who are interested in medical research.
 

“The short-term goal of the program is to introduce bright young students to the world of medical research,” said Charles E. Wood, Ph.D., a professor and chair of the department of physiology and functional genomics in the College of Medicine and principal investigator of the NIH training grant that funds the program. “It is our hope that those students who are successful will become future academicians and help to solve the most pressing problems for which we now have no solutions.”
 

Students are assigned faculty mentors who take them to their labs and assign research projects throughout the eight-week program. At the end of the program, participants present their findings to professors and their peers.
 

For Naa Sika Williams, a UF exercise physiology senior, the experience taught her the value of trial and error in the scientific process. She worked on a project involving antibodies and antigens and how they relate to cancer cells in mice.
 

The project provided an early lesson in the ups and downs of discovery. During her first attempt at culturing cells, the cells died.

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“They just told me not to worry -- just to learn from my mistakes and move on,” she said.
 

The main benefit of the research boot camp is to help students stay competitive and on par with their peers in the medical and graduate school admissions process.
 

“When you read (research) in biology books, it’s not the same as seeing it done and how much work goes into it,” Williams said. “If this program wasn’t here, I probably wouldn’t have done research. There are still students out there who will not have done research before they apply (to medical school).”