Stephanie enjoys horseback riding and playing basketball, softball and volleyball. She would like to become a veterinarian. "I love animals, and being a vet would allow me to save them and be around them every day."
Dr. Prince, Stephanie's science teacher, is her mentor. "Because of his love for science, I figured out how fun science was," says Stephanie.
While studying photosynthesis and its effects on plants, the girls designed a project to try to improve the efficiency of plants in photosynthesis. The purpose of their project was to determine how different wavelengths of light—extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic field (EMF), strobe light and flashlight—affect the opening and closing of stomata. Stomata are epidermal openings in plants through which they emit water vapor and through which carbon dioxide and oxygen are exchanged. The girls hypothesized that the stomata would open wider when exposed to darker lights (green/blue) than they would when exposed to lighter lights (yellow/white). Their second hypothesis was that stomata would not open as wide when exposed to EMF.
The girls took tradescantia plant cuttings from outside their school and rooted them indoors. They monitored plant growth by measuring ambient temperature and relative humidity of the environment twice a day, and they set up a television microscope with a visible light source to record all stomata movement on videotape. They exposed the stomata to white light (control) and to combinations of the other types of light. Their results supported their first hypothesis that exposure to dark lights (blue and green) would cause the stomata to open wide and that the presence of EMF and the colored lights would cause the stomata to open even wider. The girls determined that the next step for their research would be to test whether the widening of the stomata had a negative or a positive effect on the long-term growth of the plant.
