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@ School: Tiffany Bernier

Tiffany BernierTiffany Bernier loves a good story. But she has to know not only how it ends, but why.
It used to be that the story was an end in itself, until she discovered a latent interest in biology in her first semester at the University of the Virgin Islands.
"I hated biology," says Bernier. "I was a humanities major, but I had to take a biology course and I became intrigued by the genetics aspect. How I might possess my mom’s eyes, but my dad’s nose."
That interest soared to national heights this fall when Bernier won first place at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Programs (HBCU-UP) National Research Conference in Washington, D. C. for her poster presentation.
"There were hundreds of people there," she says. "I was sitting with some students who told me ‘that’s you!’ I didn’t think I’d won because I didn’t recognize the category," Bernier says.
She wasted no time getting to the stage to receive the award in the ecology, natural and snvironmental sciences.
"I don’t really know the exact number of entrants in that category, about 48, I think," she says. Overall, there were 241 poster presentations in all categories.
Her poster, titled "Confirmation of Comparative Genomic Hybridization with PCR," depicts Bernier’s summer research at the University of Iowa, where she was one of 14 students selected across the nation for the program.
Bernier is a petite, brown-eyed 21-year old with a big smile and a bigger curiosity about just about everything, under microscopes and out. She is happy to talk about her experiences. She attends UVI on a scholarship from Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic School where she was 2006 valedictorian.
"About the storytelling," she says, "it goes back to my mother. When I couldn’t get to sleep at night, she told me to make up a story, use colors, what people say." She pauses, "All my life I’ve been making up stories. That’s why I thought I’d hate biology – I wanted to do creative writing."
The stories these days are adventures, mostly scientific explorations, from where green turtles live and why they live there to explorations of our genetic makeup – but not always.
Her creative talents ranged far enough afield earlier this year that she was asked by Douglas Larche, UVI’s playwright-in-residence, to be an assistant director for his play "Truth on Trial: The Ballad of Sojourner Truth," with a cast almost 50 actors.
The play is the story of Sojourner Truth, an illiterate former slave who fought for the causes of abolition, women’s rights, temperance and evangelical Christianity all her life. Larche spent more than 20 years working on the drama.
Bernier is modest about that experience:
"I love creative things, and I knew Dr. Larche," she says. She doesn’t dwell on that experience, anxious to move on to the world of scientific discovery.
A student in the UVI Emerging Caribbean Scientist programs, Bernier went to the waters of Brewers, Spratt and Lindbergh Bays to study green turtle population.
This summer at the University of Iowa, Bernier spent 10 weeks trying to put an end to the story of six missing genes.
"I’ve been to the states, but never to the Midwest. It’s a whole different atmosphere." she says. "Iowa University is huge, it has its own bus line and a massive research hospital."
Bernier lived in a dormitory with three roommates from Iowa.
"I made pates for them," she says. "I never knew there were so many kinds of potatoes, or corn so high. One of my roommates even has her own business, tasseling corn."
Bernier worked with Peter Nagy, assistant professor of molecular pathology, on a project to identify missing genes in the makeup of a 10-year-old in the pediatric unit, suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity (ADH) and other disorders.
"This research revealed that the patient had lost a total of six genes, two of which might have been especially important to his neural development," Bernier says.
However, the research proved extremely frustrating.
"It was so difficult," she says. "I refused to give up. I just knew it had to end; I couldn’t just stop working so hard to get no results. I went back a bunch of times," she says.
And the end of the story: "When you finally get something, you are so excited."
Tiffany Bernier with her prize-winning poster. (Photo courtesy of Tiffany Bernier)"Science just happens," she says. "It makes me think more than I normally would. It gives you a new insight and helps you develop analytic thinking."
Bernier is considering several schools for graduate study, some in North Carolina including Duke University; the University of Iowa; or John Hopkins in Baltimore.
Right now she has her hands full with 10 hours a semester of tutoring, a part-time job at Hodge & Francois law offices, and continuing ECS research.
The young scientist says she wants to earn a doctorate in genetics, but she still has a yen to tell a story.
"I will do that," she says, "in scientific writing."

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