Justin Sherrill
Desert Ridge High School (Mesa)
Serum Biomarkers of Mortality Risk: a 40-year Follow-up Study
Q. Tell us about your school.
It's Desert Ridge High School in Mesa, Arizona. Great students. I teach freshman biology, and this will be my first year of teaching AP biology. So I'll be having juniors and seniors for the first time.
Q. Why did you choose to have this experience at the UA?
A lot of what I teach to my students has been known for half a century. The textbook has a lot of content, but it isn't very cutting edge, and it doesn't teach how to actually do science. I like to do programs like this because it allows me to get out there and actually do science myself. Then I can take it back to the classroom and show students what it's like. And that starts to get them more excited about it. They don't initially understand that when it comes to learning about biology it opens a lot more opportunities than to become a medical doctor.
Q. What was the most exciting part of your research?
This summer the statistical part of it was kind of dry. I was working with databases. But that's a really necessary process because we're trying to find out if there is some correlation between high or low protein levels in people's blood and cause of death. We have this huge study group of about 4,000 people who have died in the last six or seven years, which we had to update and process. Next summer we can get in there with the blood samples and test them for the different proteins looking for that correlation. We work with our databases using a software called Stata. I was really impressed with how much this program could do with statistics. I was amazed by it.
Q. What are you going to do next?
These blood samples have been cryo-preserved for about 40 years. We're taking them out of the freezer and we're testing them for a number of specific proteins. The thinking is that If breast cancer is in your family, maybe you have the genes for that, or maybe you don't. If you could look at protein levels, which is obviously just the step right after DNA, then you might have a better idea of your risk. If you have elevated levels of a specific protein, then maybe you do have a greater risk of breast cancer or other diseases.
Q. How will you take this into your classroom?
That's going to be tricky, especially since the statistics part of it is so complicated. It's going to be more about using the steps in the scientific process that I used, and just getting the kids excited about the science part of it. The good thing about the study I'm doing is that death is something that's interesting to teenagers, although they tend to believe they're invincible at that age. So I'm sure I'll be able to get them interested in what I've been doing here. And then hopefully they'll be able to apply some of the same steps to what we do in the lab and the classroom.
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