Sarah volunteers in an after-school program for third, fourth, and fifth graders who are considered at-risk students. In this mentoring program, she has designed and implemented teaching curricula geared toward the problems these students face in a traditional classroom setting. Sarah says she would like to become a teacher because "there is an urgent need to stop the growing apathy and indifference in educating kids today."
Her science hero is Jonas Salk. "Although he never received a Nobel Prize and suffered the criticism and jealous contempt of many scientists, he never became discouraged," Sarah says.
Both of Sarah's parents have smoked since she and her sister were born. This caused her to wonder how secondhand smoke affects the brain and behavior, especially her own. It is believed that spiders called orb weavers have constructed their webs in the same fashion for 125 million years. Sarah wanted to determine whether exposure to environmental tobacco smoke would affect an orb weaver spider's nervous system and web construction behavior.
Sarah captured two specimens and allowed them to build webs in two transparent eight-gallon containers. Then she began to expose the spiders to tobacco smoke twice daily for 30 days. The spiders' webs were examined and then torn down every four days. Gradual changes in web construction eventually escalated to "gross web distortion" by the end of the 30-day period. Sarah concluded that the smoke did have a negative effect on the spiders, providing graphic evidence of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke.
