Project success
Most researchers will tell you that making a great scientist doesn’t require vast amounts of knowledge, but rather a keen interest in learning. Just ask Tomer Avidor-Reiss, an assistant professor of cell biology at Harvard who has been inviting area high school students to work in his lab for the past five years. “The key for me is motivation,” Avidor-Reiss said, sitting in his office at Harvard Medical School (HMS) surrounded by blown-up photographs of the fruit fly cells he spends his days researching. “We can teach them, but they have to have motivation to learn. We bring students into the lab, show them the science, and they have no choice — they fall in love.” Such is the goal of Project Success, a program operated by the Harvard Medical School Office for Diversity and Community Partnership that targets Boston and Cambridge high school students to participate in mentored summer research internships...