Sarah is involved in many sports teams, including soccer, basketball, track and field hockey. She is also a junior Girl Scout and plays the piano and clarinet. She hopes to become a medical researcher, because "I'm interested in scientific research and firmly believe I can turn this interest into a successful career."
Sarah's father is her mentor, because he "spurred my interest in science."
When a relative who had smoked most of his life died from cancer, Sarah wanted to determine whether nicotine has an effect on cancer. After researching angiogenesis, the process by which new blood vessels form from pre-existing ones, Sarah hypothesized that nicotine might have angiogenesis-stimulating effects that would increase tumor growth.
Sarah conducted three experiments to prove her hypothesis. Her first experiment tested the effects of nicotine on endothelial-cell proliferation, and she determined that nicotine did increase the amount of endothelial-cell tube formation. For her second experiment, Sarah used a CAM model to examine the effects of nicotine on angiogenesis. She drilled a small hole in the shell of a 10-day fertilized chick egg, leaving the embryo intact. She exposed the egg to different amounts of nicotine and incubated it for three days. After examining the egg membrane, she found that nicotine showed a significant increase in blood vessel formation. In her third experiment, Sarah added breast cancer cells to a seven-day fertilized chick egg, and then added nicotine. She found that nicotine significantly increased the growth of the breast cancer and doubled the rate of growth of the breast tumors after one week.
