John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

 

By Jennifer Nislow

Imagine taking a device no bigger than a match book to a crime scene and using it to instantly identify illicit substances in a drop of blood. This tool, like all of the projects Marcel Roberts has worked on since graduating from John Jay in 2002, he hopes will one day have a profound impact on forensic science.

Roberts, a chemical biologist, is a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University inMontreal, Canada. He was part of John Jay’sCSTEP (Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program), a New York State Department of Education initiative that has provided mentoring, research training and funding to promising forensic science students at John Jay for more than a decade. In 2006, the grant became one of four funding streams making up a new, expansive program at the College called PRISM (Program for Research Initiatives forScience Majors).

According to Professor Anthony Carpi of the Department of Sciences, “PRISM tries to present a seamless front to students. When students are looking to do undergraduate research, they talk to Professor Ron Pilette, who is the PRISM coordinator. He figures out whether they’re eligible for any type of funding. So rather than having students deal with that headache, Ron has the headache.”

At present, stipends are awarded only to upper-class students based on the research proposals they submit. The awards range from $500 to $1,500 per semester, and up to $2,500 for an academic year, with the possibility of additional funds during the summer.

PRISM students, who are selected based on their grades and interest in doing research,are exposed to professional conferences held at colleges and universities around the country. They gain experience working with other researchers in a lab, learn how to meet with professors and potential research advisors, and present their work.

“They (Pilette and Carpi) are just unbelievable mentors,” said former PRISM student and future dentist Daniel Cocris, who graduated from John Jay in 2006. Cocris, 35, came to the U.S. from Romania in 1995. In January, he interviewed at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine and at New York University College of Dentistry.

Anthony Ho and Stacey-Ann Mano are both seniors and forensic science majors who began as CSTEP students but are continuing their studies under PRISM. While the stipends they received helped, money is not what drew them to the program. Both joined for the opportunity to do research.

Since 2005, the Department of Sciences has offered an undergraduate research course as an alternative to the traditionalc apstone project all science majors are required to complete. In their senior year, students may take either a traditional externship at an outside lab, or complete the same 400 hours doing research in-house. While PRISM students may select either option, most, like Ho and Mano, choose the undergraduate research class where they — in effect —receive stipends for fulfilling their internship.

Carpi’s own research is on the ability of elemental mercury to vaporize into the atmosphere repeatedly after being deposited in soil or water through coal combustion, metal smelting and trash incineration. All ofhis PRISM students are investigating different aspects of this ecological problem.

Joining CSTEP as a sophomore, Ho, 21,began working with Carpi in his junior year.Ho became interested in science as a sixth-grader when he was accepted into a magnet program for students who showed talent in that subject. As a sophomore at Brooklyn Technical High School — where students are required to declare a major — Ho enrolled in the school’s bio-medical program. But, he did not “fit the mold” of a medical student, he said. Looking around for a program that would provide him with the classes he needed to be pre-med, but not a traditional pre-med program, he became a forensic science major.

“I had never done anything with environmental science,” said Ho. “With Dr.Carpi, I’m working on a new theory he has for the emission of mercury. I am also doing aproject with Dr. [Nathan] Lents that is wildly different,” he said. “We mutate fibroblasts and investigate how a certain gene, the different members of the CCN family, affects the growth. Two crazily different projects, but I like both.”

Ho is still considering medical school. After he graduates, he will take a year off to study for the MCATs and GREs.

“We’ll see which one I do better at,” said Ho.“From there, we’ll see what happens.”

Mano admits to being one of those whose fascination with the program “CSI” led her to enroll in John Jay’s forensic science program. But forensic science in practice was not what it seemed like on TV. So, Mano has decided to go to medical school; she is planning to become a forensic pathologist. In addition to PRISM, the 23-year-old participates in a medical mentoring program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

According to Mano, her work in Carpi’s lab has helped her to overcome “stage fright”when presenting before faculty and peers. It has also taught her to work on her own in the lab without a partner or instructor.

“Dr. Carpi is there as a mentor,” she said,“but he is not on your back. I am there sometimes by myself and can think logically to get through a problem if I have one, or just be able to work on an experiment from beginning to end, all by myself.”

While PRISM teaches students how to do research, from note-taking, to presentations, to handling instruments and all of the othernuts-and-bolts components that comprise the  endeavor, Carpi also tries to instill in them the broader concept: that science is more than just the memorization of facts and is, in fact,a way of thinking, an “epistemology” —something that he considers hard to convey in a conventional classroom. “As a forensic scientist, you’re actually trying to understand all the different possible ways that something could have happened, investigating each one,and then eliminating them to find the one true possibility,” said Ho. “In research science…the approach really shouldn’t be so concrete. I hate to use the word abstract, but in away it is.”

The undergraduate research he did as a CSTEP student, according to McGill University’s Roberts, made him aware of “how big science really is.”

Roberts, 29, was born in New York City, but grew up in France where his father worked for the United Nations. He discovered John Jay while researching colleges and universities at an American library. Forensic science, Roberts explained, combined two favorite subjects: science and law.

In his freshman year, Roberts attracted the attention of Carpi, Pilette and (retired) Professor Morris Zedek, who all became invaluable mentors. They gave Roberts and a lab partner the opportunity to do research on a project involving photo remediation, that isusing plants — in this case, barley — to leach cadmium and other heavy metals from the soil.

“It was an extremely cool idea,” said Roberts.

The project won a McNair Fellow, CSTEP NY Research Award in 2002.

“When I was in John Jay, my initial idea was to just get my forensic science degree and then start working in a forensic lab…I thought the best-case scenario would be working for the DEA or the FBI,” said Roberts. “The idea of grad school had never really crossed my mind until they ([Carpi, Pilette and Zedek) said it was actually possible.”

After graduating from John Jay, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Boston College. His work there was in electro chemical and spectroscopic studies of biomolecular complexes. As a fellow at McGill, he is working on the development of a digital microfluidic device that can detect biomolecules in a small sample of liquid. The idea is to be able to detect multiple components in a single droplet. The chipwould be approximately 2-inches by 3-inches big.

Theoretically, Roberts explained, the device could be taken to a crime scene where it could detect specific proteins and enzymesin an amount as small as six microliters ofblood.

“All of my projects have always had potential for use in forensic science, since John Jay,”he said.

A number of National Science Foundation reports, noted Carpi, have found that publicly-funded institutions with a predominantly minority student body generally do not have the resources to offer science students the kind of research opportunities provided by well-funded science programs at upper-tier schools.

PRISM not only offers that chance to John Jay students, but also gives them a means of forging those personal relationships with faculty that prove helpful later on, when good letters of recommendation are needed for post-baccalaureate programs and jobs.

“It’s really beneficial, especially with students who may not have that type of environment at home, or may have that environment, but jus tnot in science,” said Carpi. “That’s why we’ve been pushing it so hard,” he said. “When we look at success as measured by post-graduate education, it is the students who are doing undergraduate research that are pursuing graduate school.”

Through PRISM, Mano recently went on a tour of Yale University.

“It kind of opened my eyes to a bigger school, to the kind of things they were doing,” shesaid. “I don’t think as many people take advantage of PRISM as they should. It’s been very, very useful.”

Jennifer Nislow is senior writer at John Jay College.