Talented Youngsters Tour NLM, NIH
Photo: Chia-Chi Charlie Chang
What happens to former students involved in the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth?
Sometimes they work at the National Institutes of Health.
That’s what happened to Adam Korengold and several interns from NLM.
Recently, they joined about a dozen other NIH employees wearing “Ask Me About My Awesome Job at NIH” buttons for the “Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedicine” event for students from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth and their parents.
Throughout the day, more than 75 tweens and teenagers from the center participated in talks and tours of NLM and NIH. This second annual event was cosponsored by NLM and the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Photo: Chia-Chi Charlie Chang
As part of the program, staff from NLM, NHGRI and other institutes were invited to speak with the students and parents for small group discussions during lunch.
For Korengold, an applications lead at NLM’s Office of Computer and Communications Systems, the chance to meet with students who reminded him of his childhood was irresistible. In speaking with students, he drew upon the connections between research and science, communication, elections and even football.
Ben Kussmaul addressed both college life and his internship in NLM’s Communications Engineering Branch. “I had a great time talking to students with the same passion for science that I had as a kid,” said Kussmaul, a student at Swarthmore College.
What happened to the students who attended the NIH event? They learned more than they expected.
Photo: Chia-Chi Charlie Chang
Drs. Terry Yoo and Dina Demner-Fushman of NLM’s Office of High Performance Computing and Communications served as keynote speakers. Yoo was particularly enthusiastic about speaking—his two sons participated in the Hopkins program when they were younger.
During tours of NIH, NLM and the office of artists from NLM’s Lister Hill Audiovisual Program Development Branch, the students and their families had the opportunity to take a behind-the-scenes look at science.
Meeting with scientists, researchers and interns over lunch, the students and their parents had the chance to engage in conversation. Who knows? Maybe one day in the future, one or more of these young scholars will be back on campus, sporting a button that says, “Ask Me About My Awesome Job at NIH.”