University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Participants worked in teams of four to produce digital maps analyzing cancer rates in the six counties of Western New York. Photo: DORI SAJDAK

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  On the final day of the workshop, students presented their project to family, friends and local scientists. Photo: DORI SAJDAK

By CHARLOTTE HSU

Published: July 12, 2012

A date with a supercomputer and lessons in computer programming were highlights of UB’s Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science, which invites high school students to learn how computers are shaping the future of science.

Through the two-week program, which ended July 6, a dozen young scientists enlisted the help of computers to study cancer rates in Western New York.

The participants learned PHP and HTML, and used these programming languages to produce digital maps of cancer clusters. The work focused on six counties in the region: Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Niagara, Orleans and Wyoming.

“I was totally blown away by the computer programming because I had never done it before,” said attendee Emily Ludwig, a senior at Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Heart.

“It’s a great workshop,” she added. “The people are really nice—and not too nerdy, even though it’s computing.”

Including Ludwig, this year’s attendees included 11 high school students and one college student. They worked in teams of four to analyze cancer rates under the guidance of Alisa Neeman, a scientific programmer at UB’s supercomputing facility, the Center for Computational Research (CCR). Michael Dziadaszek, a UB undergraduate student and CCR intern, also provided support.

CCR has hosted the workshop every year since 1999. Since 2007, it has been held in honor of Eric Pitman, who was a freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute when he passed away in 2007 after a brief illness.

“The workshop interests kids in science and stokes their imaginations by showing them some of the exciting things that are happening in Western New York,” said Bruce Pitman, dean of UB’s College of Arts and Sciences and Eric Pitman’s father. “It lets them know that there are opportunities here for great careers in science.”

This year’s participants enjoyed a whirlwind of activities, including behind-the-scenes visits to several of Buffalo Niagara’s most prominent scientific institutions.

They toured Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI) and CCR. At Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the students viewed a gamma knife and a linear accelerator, radiotherapy tools that use computational techniques to calculate the ideal beam intensities for different patients.

Daryl Nazareth, a Roswell Park assistant professor and medical physicist, led a hands-on learning activity that demonstrated how a process called optimization enables global positioning systems (GPS) to determine an object’s location.

“I think it’s just a really good opportunity any time these kids can do something in the real world,” said Jennifer Schmitt, a science teacher at North Collins High School who helped one of her students, Zak Gier, apply successfully for the workshop.

Schmitt and Gier’s mother, Jeanette Gier, were among families and friends who attended the workshop’s last day to view student projects.

“I’m so happy,” Jeanette Gier said. “[Zak] was just so excited to work with the computers.”

Local scientists who assisted with the workshop included Tom Furlani, CCR director; Marc Halfon, UB associate professor of biochemistry; Norma Nowak, director of science and technology at UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences; Bill Duax, HWI research scientist and UB professor of structural biology; and Dheerendra Prasad, medical director of the Department of Radiation Medicine and associate professor at Roswell.