Alyson Katerenchuk didn’t plan to be a prehistoric paparazza, but that was her job this summer at the University of Alberta.
The Paul Kane student was one of 37 Grade 11 students who got six weeks of paid experience in the University of Alberta’s science labs this summer as part of the 35th annual Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science, and Technology (WISEST) summer internship program.
Katerenchuk said she had originally hoped to do something related to engineering but ended up working with renowned paleontologist Philip Currie on dinosaurs. Part of that work involved taking thousands of cellphone pictures of an Albertosaurus skeleton from every conceivable angle and compiling them into a manipulatable 3D computer model.
The model let researchers simulate how dinosaurs moved in real life and study/3D print copies of these often-fragile fossils so they don’t have to be shipped long distances, said Archbishop Jordan Catholic student Keeley Hatch, Katerenchuk’s lab partner.
“You don’t have to send that whole (dinosaur) head to Mexico.”
Katerenchuk and Hatch showed off their summer research to about a hundred guests at the U of A’s WISEST wrap-up event on Aug. 15.
WISEST is meant to get Grade 11 students interested in non-traditional fields (science, math, engineering, and technology for girls and nursing/nutrition for boys) and get them interested in science careers, said team lead Fervone Goings.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for jobs in these areas and we want both genders to know there’s a place for them in whatever field they pursue.”
Research shows that greater diversity in groups leads to better ideas, and that the reverse is also true, Goings said. Women tend to be under-diagnosed for heart attacks because most heart research is done on men, for example, and that’s in part because there aren’t enough women in the field asking the right questions.
“When you lack diversity, there are some significant errors and there are some significant oversights.”
This year’s WISEST students studied the food preferences of chickadees, extracted diamonds from rock using electricity, and used Space Invaders to teach Cree, among other projects.
Katerenchuk and Hatch also helped Currie’s lab find lost dinosaur sites using old photos and maps.
You can basically trip over a bone with every step in Dinosaur Provincial Park, and researchers don’t have time to collect them all, Katerenchuk said. Researchers often instead note a bone’s location by poking a hole in the appropriate spot on an aerial photo with the hope that they'll come back to it later. There are now thousands of such notes, and researchers aren’t sure which sites they’ve searched, what bones are still there, or, most significantly, what altitude the bones were at (which tells you a lot about their age).
It was Hatch and Katerenchuk’s job to sort through hundreds of decades-old aerial photos of the park, line up the tiny pinholes with a modern elevation map, figure out the GPS co-ordinates using rulers, the scrawled notes on the back of the photos, and guesswork, and put the results into an online map.
“It was extremely tedious at times,” Katerenchuk said, but they got some surprisingly accurate results that could help researchers learn more about the age and behaviours of dinosaurs.
Hatch said WISEST was a “life-changing experience” that let her work with science and like-minded people.
“You can be your nerdy self and they don’t judge you.”
She and Katerenchuk said they plan to get into biomedical and mechanical engineering (respectively) at the U of A once they finish high school.
Visit www.ualberta.ca/services/wisest for more on WISEST.
