TRADITION Three former Treasure Coast high school students have been awarded the first $3,000 internships at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute's research laboratories in the Tradition Center for Innovation.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Foundation at VGTI, known as SURF-VGTI, pairs each student with a faculty mentor who will then work on research project for six weeks starting June 11. Their research findings will be presented in late July, according to the VGTI website.

Daniel Rosenberg and Lysa Vola, both graduates of Jensen Beach High School, and Robert Tack, a graduate of Port St. Lucie High School all now college students are this year's first interns, said John Schatzle, principle investigator and director of scientific affairs at VGTI.

For the past few years, Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, also located in Tradition, has been offering similar type summer internships to area college students and public school teachers.

VGTI concentrated on offering internships to students from the Treasure Coast and providing them real-world research experience, Schatzle said. "They will be working like any other researcher would be in the lab."

VGTI opened the doors of its new $47 million, 100,000-square-foot research facility in February to develop vaccines and immunotherapies for diseases such as AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis and diseases associated with emerging viral infections.

Rosenberg, 19, who now is a biomedical engineering student at the University of Miami, will be paired with a mentor who is studying HIV, Schatzle said.

"We've actually found one of its major hiding places in the body and trying to figure out how to purge it, and effectively have a cure for HIV," he said. "(Rosenberg's) lab is working on that project."

Rosenberg said he is excited to be working on such an important study.

"The last semester I took a physiology class and I learned a lot about AIDS and now I can apply that knowledge," Rosenberg said. "It astounds me that it impacts so many people every year and we have not found a solid cure for the disease."

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Tradition-based VGTI offers its first summer research internships

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