Stuck in Winter Traffic? How to Stay Safe on the Road

Overcoming obstacles that caused the cancellation of the Student Science Jeopardy! Tournament last summer, Scientific Library staff used a virtual platform to hold the 14th annual tournament earlier this month.

At first, Meredith Yeager, Ph.D., thought there was a mistake in the data. She was examining the association between exposure to ionizing radiation after the 1986 Chernobyl power plant disaster and the frequency of exposed Ukrainians later passing radiation-driven genetic mutations to their children. Previous studies suggested that the children’s DNA should have contained multiple such mutations. It didn’t.

The Spring Research Festival came to Fort Detrick this year without its signature massive tent, the home of a sprawling equipment expo with dozens of booths. It came without audiences in auditoriums or gatherings around scientific posters. The community didn’t circulate between buildings for events. On the surface, it may have seemed that the festival didn’t come at all. But after being cancelled last year due to the pandemic, the annual two-day event did indeed return in a virtual format.

During the 2020–2021 academic year, the Werner H. Kirsten (WHK) intern cohort experienced the first entirely virtual WHK program. Given the uniqueness of the situation, we, Yasmine Zouhairi and Leslie Hilares, interns working with mentor Cathleen Cullen in NCI’s Education Outreach Program, felt it was important to collect data about the changes in our scientific education and what it could mean for the future of learning.

A potato, puffin, pineapple, orange, and lemon stood behind small electronic scoreboards. White text, read aloud by the Scientific Library’s Alan Doss, materialized on a blue field above their heads. “Every action has an equal and opposite…”