Student Briefs
• Nursing student Emily LeVan won the women's division of the Maine Marathon in October. She set a record, turning in the fastest time ever for a woman in a Maine marathon, finishing in 2:39:54. This time she also smashed her own, two-year-old course record by more than seven minutes, and placed her fourth overall in the marathon.
LeVan, who gave birth to her daughter eight months before the race, had two goals for the race: to break 2:45, and ideally, to break 2:40. She accomplished both!
• Two USM chemistry students landed spectacular paid internships this past summer—at NASA! Marilen Preda worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Aaron Keller spent his internship at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Tex.
Preda calls the internship, “a once in a lifetime experience.” During her internship, she conducted astrobiology research under her mentor, Dr. Alexandre Tsapin. Her primary area of research was determining the amino acid content in ancient fossils. She looked for the presence of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, which might indicate life. Other analyses she conducted were on ice samples from Antarctic lakes—an extremely cold environment that may simulate the conditions found on planets in our, or other, galaxies. Preda's findings could be extrapolated if ice is found during NASA missions to other planets.
Keller worked with Dr. L. E. Nyquist, a scientist in charge of two thermal ionization mass spectrometers that measure the isotopic ratios of elements. Analysis of these ratios can reveal information about the history of the solar system by showing how long it has been since a given meteorite was formed, the isotopic composition of other parts of the solar system, and how homogenized the isotopes have been throughout the solar system's history.
Both Preda and Keller received their NASA internships through the Maine Space Grant Consortium, which is comprised of colleges, universities, research labs, state agencies, businesses, and nonprofit organizations, all of whom help further NASA's goals while benefitting Maine in the areas of science and technology.
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