First-Time Mentor Supports Undergraduate Intern in First Laboratory Experience

Jayde Aufrecht, a Pauling Fellow with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), knows from personal experience how valuable a mentor can be. 

As an undergraduate, Aufrecht said she wasn’t the best student, but that it was because of her mentor taking an interest in her that she found her passion for science research and her road forward in her career.

“I owe where I am to my undergrad mentor,” she said. “I started doing research my junior year of college. Having that hands-on research experience gave me context for my coursework, which helped me in my classes. My mentor was amazing. She pushed me to go to graduate school, take risks, and pursue research. We still stay in touch.”

This past year, Aufrecht had the opportunity to continue that mentorship legacy with a mentee of her own through EMSL. She was approached by a staff member with PNNL’s Community College Internship (CCI) program to see if she would be interested in taking on a student intern to help with her research. 

“It was the first time I’ve ever had a mentee,” she said. “I thought it sounded like the perfect time as we were just about to wrap up a project and we had some loose ends dangling. It would allow the student to come in and tie up some of those loose ends of the experiments, all while gaining some great research experience.”

Aufrecht’s research specializes in using synthetic habitats to understand ecosystem interactions. She uses bioprinting to create synthetic soil aggregates that simulate underground environments, which helps identify how to scale up those systems into ecosystems. Her research is important in predicting how biogeochemical interactions and microbial community structure govern nutrient cycling in soils.

“Knowing how carbon cycling happens at the microbial scale is important in predicting climate impacts at the human scale,” she said. “Being able to simulate that microscale environment and understand the microbial community interactions is going to help down the line for a variety of research applications—especially in regard to climate change and sustainable agriculture.”

Aufrecht was paired up with Justin Stribling, a student from Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. Given the pandemic, Stribling had few laboratory experiences at the undergraduate level due to classes going mostly virtual. The lab setting at EMSL, Stribling said, not only helped him learn basic laboratory fundamentals, but also gave him an insight into laboratory research and whether he would like to pursue the option as a career. 

“This opportunity was everything I was looking for,” he said. “I hadn’t gotten any sort of job shadow or internship experience before it,  and being able to participate in the CCI program helped me really understand what I am going into as a career.” 

Before his internship, Stribling had expressed an interest in learning more about bioprinting from a biomedical perspective. While the research he supported at EMSL didn’t directly apply to medicine, the tools and experience he gained was relative to the industry and provided great practical experience that he can use moving forward in his academic and professional careers. 

“My current interest for a career is to perform postdoc research in biomedical science, specifically engineering artificial tissues,” he said. “At first, I was a little skeptical about a project focused on systems biology and environmental science, but I realized how much these research opportunities lined up with what I want to do in the future. I found it to be enjoyable to learn about this research, even though I never really considered it as a possible field for me.” 

Through the internship, Stribling focused on making the bio-printed soil aggregates they used for their experiments more chemically realistic to soils. He added different clay minerals back into the hydrogel bio-prints, worked at characterizing the permeability of the hydrogels, and designed and wrote code for the bioprinter they used. 

“My favorite part of the experience at PNNL was knowing that I was contributing to modern-day research that hasn’t been done before, as well as all of the really cool lab equipment,” he said.

Stribling said Aufrecht’s mentorship was immensely valuable in learning the ropes of a laboratory research environment. He said she was deeply helpful, caring, and an especially creative thinker. There were numerous times, he said, where he was unsure how to proceed on a particular aspect of his projects. 

“She would come up with a solution or multiple,” he said. “She was there to help me every step of the way, connecting me with and providing resources, to being interested in how I was doing, personally.” 

Aufrecht said she found Stribling working in her lab as a student intern to be an incredibly valuable experience. She said in addition to the support he provided for experiments and other aspects of her project, she enjoyed supporting what could be a future researcher along his pathway of learning foundational skills and identifying what research pathway could be a good fit for him.

“Getting to pay that back felt really good,” she said. “Overall, being a mentor was a great experience.”