As in previous years, JHU/HEMI is a host site for the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) high school apprenticeships (formally called REAP).  This apprenticeship is focused on providing Maryland high school students from underserved/underrepresented minorities in STEM an opportunity to participate in a research project at a university.  DCG participated in the HEMI AEOP program this summer, supporting two students, Giancarlo Zambrano (mentored by Nicholas Gigliotti) and Gianluca Zambrano (mentored by Emily Hopkins).

Giancarlo spent his apprenticeship analyzing TEM micrograph images of cervical tissue at varying stages of pregnancy. His work goes toward an effort to standardize microscopy data analysis of tissue fibril sizes with machine learning techniques.  In addition, Giancarlo gained experience synthesizing hydrogels and learned about basic ESEM imaging. Giancarlo will be attending Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2022 to pursue materials and biomolecular engineering.

Gianluca focused on training and improving a machine learning object detection model to analyze in situ irradiation data from TEM videos, and learned about many common electron microscopy techniques and preparation methods. In the fall of 2022, Gianluca will be attending Duke University to pursue engineering (undecided).