The Charkootsa News up on the Flathead Reservation in Montana recently made the following announcement:
PABLO — A very talented Salish Kootenai College student Amy Stiffarm placed first in the scientific oral and poster presentation research competitions at the 2010 American Indian Higher Education Consortium conference in Chandler, Ariz. Both competitions are sponsored by the All Nations Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (ANLSAMP) Program. Amy’s Poster/Oral presentations were entitled, “Detection of Phage Genes in the Genome of Mycobacterium Smegmatis.” She was a competitor amongst 35 poster and 16 oral research presenters.
Amy is a member of the Gros-Ventre Tribe and currently a sophomore in General Science at SKC. Her research project has taken place on the Flathead Indian Reservation. She began research in November of 2009 and proposes to complete the study by August of 2010. She will graduate this spring with her Associate of General Science degree and proposes to graduate with her bachelor of general science degree from SKC in the spring of 2012. She would like to pursue a master’s degree in public health in nutritional sciences and plans to earn a doctoral degree in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Washington.
The ANLSAMP Program is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and housed at Salish Kootenai College at the Indigenous Math and Science Institute, or IMSI. The goal of ANLSAMP is to double the number of American Indians achieving bachelor’s degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). ANLSAMP has 34 partner institutions including tribal colleges across 13 states. ANLSAMP is the only alliance, which specifically focuses on American Indians, the least represented minority in any of the STEM fields.
For more information in regards to ANLSAMP Sponsored events at AIHEC, contact Zetra Wheeler, ANLSAMP-IMSI Interim Director/Program Manager at Salish Kootenai College. She may be reached at (406) 275-4998 or send an email to zetra_wheeler@skc.edu
Jodi Rave