Last summer, I found myself in thigh-high waders making my way through a shallow creek near the Jenkintown train station. I was there to observe a Temple biology major and computer science major who were involved in aquatics research with Laura Toran, the Albert W. and Alice M. Weeks Chair in Environmental Geology. The two were among the 55 Temple College of Science and Technology students who participated in CST’s Undergraduate Research Program (URP) this past summer.

The URP provides some of the college’s most promising students with stipends of up to $4,000 to spend their summers working with faculty researchers; they also collaborate on research with the professors during the academic year. The resulting story, “Summer Means Research,” was the cover story (pp. 16-20) for the 2015 edition of Outlook, CST’s alumni magazine.

To write the story I conducted numerous interviews with students and faculty members from all five of CST’s departments, as well as with the program’s director. I also interviewed and highlighted URP success stories: graduates who have gone on to doctoral programs at such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins, and others who are now biotech researchers in California and at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute.

As CST’s main freelance writer, I also wrote short profiles of three accomplished alumni (pp. 20-21) and collaborated on a story about the college’s new Professional Science Master’s degree program (pp. 13-15).

To view my work in the 2015 edition of Outlook, click here.