Research is the core of academia, and publication its ultimate high. Traditionally, undergraduate students' research is confined to papers for school. Their main exposure to peer-reviewed journals comes when citing articles from these sources, and the pressure to be cited doesn't set in until later. More and more, however, students are getting published earlier. The work of these precocious students is often a less intense version of the type of research done by graduate students, and they figure they might as well be recognized now.

The summer before Jennifer Stella '05 was a senior in high school, she was listed as an author of a paper about cell death (the scientific term is apoptosis) published in the journal Developmental Brain Research.

Stella worked with researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas. She was able to get the position through her Advanced Placement biology teacher, who sent Stella's resume to the head of the biology department at the university. Stella studied rats that had half of their brain cells die before they were born. The research team was looking for possible connections to Parkinson's disease and other human neurodegenerative diseases.

"It was my first real experience with research," Stella said. "It was amazing-it made me more sure that I wanted to do research."

What was even more amazing to Stella was that she was credited in the study as one of five authors. "There were at least 10 to 12 Ph.D.'s and they listed a high school student as an author," Stella said.

Stella said she worked mainly with Ph.D. students, conducting statistical analyses and studying photographs of cells stained with flourescent dyes, which allowed them to examine the nucleis and other structures and compare "mutant rat brains to normal rat brains."

The atmosphere was "pretty informal," Stella said. She said she was intimidated at first, but once she became adept at her project, she felt more comfortable.

"One of the grad students would always introduce me as 'the high school student,' " she said, noting that the next youngest student was a college junior. She helped give a presentation at one of the lab meetings. "I guess I tried to forget that I was in high school," she said.

Being published before college helped Stella "get into a lab the first week of freshman year" here at Brandeis, which is rare. In Prof. Chandler Fulton's (BIOL) laboratory, she studies a method of cell death that has potential to advance cancer treatment. Stella, a biology and creative writing major, is writing her senior thesis based on her research in Fulton's lab.

"I had always thought about research, but never done it in a real setting," Stella said. The experience of working in a lab before coming to Brandeis taught her "a lot about working independently in a college atmosphere, and having the responsibility of my own project as part of a larger team." Since the work was fairly open-ended, she found out that research is a creative process.

"It was so neat that you could have a question and ask it and find all these different ways to answer it."

Shlomo Meislin '04 was also published as an undergraduate last year. The article appeared in the journal RNA. He was studying gene expression in mammalian cells, according to Prof. Melissa Moore (BCHM), who supervised Meislin's work. She said that Meislin "didn't have to do much" for his name to be attached to the article.

"He contributed research, but he was not the primary author of the article," Moore said. Meislin is now a graduate student at MIT, and Moore is confident that his publication as an undergraduate helped him get into MIT.

However, even though publishing as an undergraduate is an opportunity to be seized if possible, it is only "icing on the cake," according to Moore. "I recommend that students work in a research lab. It might result in a published paper...but just the experience itself is highly valuable," she said. She added that "Brandeis has a great reputation" for admittance to graduate schools.

Publishing as an undergraduate is not only helpful in building a rsum, but it also gives students confidence in their abilities as researchers.

"Because of my experience in high school, I entered college with a real idea of what a research scientist 'does', and with the knowledge that I wanted that sort of career," Stella said.