In a summer doubleheader, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) hosted back-to-back conferences over two weekends for hundreds of aspiring California student scientists.
Together, these events highlight the pipeline of homegrown talent that will shape the next decade of stem cell and gene therapy breakthroughs in California. California voters invested in regenerative medicine not just to support research, but to build labs and train future scientists to work in them.
Gathering future scientists together
It started with CIRM’s Trainee Networking Conference in Sacramento the last week of July. That conference included almost 300 undergraduates, graduate, and postdoctoral students in CIRM’s COMPASS, Bridges, and Scholars programs. A few days after the trainee conference wrapped up, more than 100 high school students converged on downtown Berkeley to showcase the work they did as part of CIRM’s SPARK summer internships in labs across the state.
Showcasing so many engaged and committed young people offered an inspiring glimpse of California’s future in regenerative medicine.
“I’m sure that however these students use what they’ve learned during their time with CIRM, the future of regenerative medicine in California is in very good hands,” said Jonathan “JT” Thomas, CIRM’s president and CEO.
Going to these conferences and meeting these young scientists continues to be among the most fulfilling parts of his job, JT said.
Finding paths to careers in science
For the students, the two conferences give them a chance to show what they’ve done in the lab and through these programs.
For Rylan Rubiono, a junior and COMPASS scholar at UC Irvine who also had been part of the SPARK program in high school, the programs opened his eyes to the sciences.
“Not too many people in high school can say they’ve worked in a lab for cell and gene therapies,” Rylan said while attending the trainee conference in Sacramento.
Changing lives
That’s really the intent of the programs and the two conferences: to show students that careers in cell and gene therapy are within reach.
Lana Ibrahem, a COMPASS student and senior at UC Santa Barbara, said she became interested in science after her grandmother developed cancer. She spent hours poring over scientific papers to try to better understand the disease. It’d fired her desire to use science to help others.
A first-generation student whose parents were refugees from Kyrgyzstan and Iraq, Ibrahem said the COMPASS scholarship gave her the help she needed to pursue her dream.
“I’ll be the first in my family to pursue science,” said Ibrahem, who works in a lab studying the debilitating neurodegenerative disease, ALS.
Many of the college and graduate students at the CIRM trainee conference began their science training in CIRM’s high school SPARK internship program.
Sanjeev Ranade, an assistant professor at UC San Diego’s Sanford Burnham Prebys Institute and the SPARK high school program coordinator, said his students often talk about the experience as transformative.
“The SPARK internship program is an incredible, life-changing experience,” Ranade said.
A lasting impact
Interns at Sanford Burnham as well as SPARK interns at 10 other institutions across the state participated in studies related to wound healing; others worked on spinal motor neurons or nerve regeneration.
“Through this program, I have gained insights about stem cells and scientific research that fundamentally changed how I understand science and how research actually gets done,” said Aryav Kaushik, a Bay Area high school student who did his SPARK internship at Stanford. “Before I was accepted into the CIRM/SPARK stem cell cohort, I thought stem cells were a mystical, cutting-edge topic that I would never be able to work on.”
Now all these students have returned to their campuses and labs, but they carry with them the understanding that they have a place in California’s scientific community. Their energy and the state’s investment in them offer a bright future for regenerative medicine.