“It was a high risk project with a very high benefit project if it worked out,” Potti said Wednesday.  “And it worked out.”

"Shivani has worked in our lab for a year and is a fantastic student,” Potti said. “She's very motivated, and all she needed was a little guidance. We opened our lab, and she quickly became a part of our research team. I hope others will follow by example and open their labs to students so that these young people can be a part of exciting scientific discoveries." 

“I believe if someone is interested in doing research, we should give them help,” Potti said of Sud.  “I gave her this project with colon cancer, and she started looking for a gene expression genotype.  It was supposed to be just a summer project, but the summer ended and she wanted to continue so she started coming to the lab three days a week after school.

“Her entire project was conceived in the lab.  She discussed it and did the work with others in the lab.  It was a great experience.”

Sud’s research may be meaningful not only in giving physicians new tools for identifying cancer risk but also for helping them determine the best treatment.  Her model, which uses gene expression to predict the risk of colon cancer recurrence, improves on existing models that rely on visual information.

Her research goes beyond improving predictions of cancer recurrence.  It also identifies drugs that may be effective in treating stage II colon cancer.

Sud told the News & Observer that she wanted to be a cancer researcher since she was in kindergarten, when a loved one developed the disease.

“I saw how hard that was for my family,” Sud told the paper. “I saw how that kind of changed my outlook on life, because when you're 6 years old, you don't think about topics such as death or dying from this type of cancer -- having your life change drastically.”

Although Duke labs have provided research opportunities for undergraduates for many years, it’s been unusual until recently for them to also welcome local high school students. Now, through its RISE program and other efforts, Duke supports local science students and teachers in a variety of ways – sometimes producing impressive results.

In December 2004, for instance, Lucie Guo of the N.C. School for Science and Mathematics won the top prize in the Westinghouse-Siemens Science Talent Search (along with classmate Xianlin Li) for work on a breast cancer biomarker she developed working in the lab of Jeffrey Marks, an associate professor of experimental surgery.

Last year, Nicholas Tang and Sagar Indurkhya, both students at the N.C. School of Science and Math, won third place in the national finals of the Siemens competition for research done with Pratt School of Engineering professors Lingchong You and Jingdong Tian.

“From the standpoint of the university, this is what we’re in the business for,” said Huntington Willard, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. “If we don’t train the next generation and don’t get them excited about a career in research, we’re missing a fundamental part of what we do

“From the student’s point of view, everyone starts this way,” Willard said.  “Someone was generous and opened doors for them.  There is work in science that you can’t learn in the classroom or by reading texts; you have to get your hands dirty in the lab.  It’s great fun.”