Each year, ADARC welcomes a number of interns who spend the summer months working in our laboratories and learning from our scientists. These young scientists are selected by ADARC's faculty due to their talent, scientific interests, and early career choices. From recent college graduates, to college students with their eyes on medical school, to extraordinary high school students, they all share a love for science that blossomed early, and an enthusiasm to contribute to end of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Sarah Rapoport

Sarah Rapoport, an intern in Dr. David Ho's laboratory, started experimenting with science and medicine using her family as willing subjects. At nine years old, she inherited her father's old ophthalmoscope and doggedly made the rounds to relatives and friends around her family's Thanksgiving dinner table, asking, "Can I look in your ears? Later, she and her brother converted a blender into a centrifuge to remove the pulp from orange juice.  

Since then, her experiments have become more sophisticated: in high school, she was an Intel finalist with a mathematical model explaining how asymmetry develops in the body. She has interned twice at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner: the first time working in their forensics laboratory, then with a pathologist, assisting with autopsies. She has recently graduated from Brown University, and will return this Fall as a Medical student. At ADARC, she worked with post-doctoral fellow Faye Yu. They studied monoclonal antibody Ibalizumab, with the goal of enhancing its ability to firmly bind CD4 cells.   

Alice Raymond

Alice Raymond, an intern in Dr. Theodora Hatziioannou's laboratory, made an important decision at age twelve: she would find a vaccine against HIV. Inspired by her native France's annual Telethon, she committed to someday ending the epidemic. As she grew up and learned the complicated science behind the challenge, she understood it wouldn't be quite so simple. That decision guided her career in HIV/AIDS research.  

Here at ADARC, she is working on a restriction factor named Apobec. Apobec  

is present in our own cells and can inhibit HIV-1 infection, but HIV expresses another protein, Vif, which can counteract Apobec. She and her colleagues are testing several Vif proteins against Apobec to study this interaction.