Samantha Farrell '11

Biology major and Wheaton Fellow Samantha Farrell ’11 spent her summer working with scientists, engineers and clinicians seeking to improve health care.

Summer work: “My internship was at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). CIMIT is a consortium of Boston’s teaching hospitals, such as Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, and Children’s Hospital, and engineering schools, such as Harvard, MIT and Boston University. The center seeks to improve health care through the interdisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers and clinicians. It focuses on solving challenging clinical problems through early stage high-risk, high-reward ideas with little access to funding.”

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Rebecca Johnson is crazy about physics, and she wants to spread the love.

The Wheaton senior not only enjoys studying the subject, she also has taught it to middle school and high school students. And that, she says, is a blast.

“Understanding the world around us is an essential part of life,” says Johnson, a physics and mathematics double major from Andover, Mass. “Teaching physics provides me with a chance to spread this enthusiasm and have fun doing it. Anyone who has played with a Van de Graaff generator* knows this joy.”

How did an undergraduate come to teach physics to middle and high school kids? She did it through a summer program called Teaching Opportunities in Physical Science (TOPS).

The six-week program offers eight undergraduate physics majors experience teaching the subject. Hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TOPS is an initiative of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms.

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