Dr. Laleh Alisaraie believes it’s important to train talented, determined young women to conduct research.

“The number of female scientists is obviously less than males, so it’s important to encourage young women to join us ― they’re brilliant and if they are trained properly early on in their educational program, they can certainly manage challenging projects when they are front line researchers,” said the assistant professor in the School of Pharmacy who is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Science, Department of Chemistry.

Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) is a non-profit, incorporated volunteer organization that aims to increase the participation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers by increasing awareness that these professions are rewarding and exciting options for women. The Student Summer Employment Program is WISE Newfoundland and Labrador’s flagship program and provides young women in Grade 11 with the opportunity to work for eight weeks in paid science and engineering research assistant roles. Memorial University has placed hundreds of students on its campuses since WISE NL’s inception 35 years ago.

Last summer, Sara Moss and Sarah Wilkins became the first students in the program at the School of Pharmacy to conduct research in computational medicinal chemistry in Dr. Alisaraie’s research lab. Ms. Moss and Ms. Wilkins worked on a part of a significant chemoinformatics project, which explores how and why chemotherapeutic drugs cause side effects.

“They received the necessary instructions and the scientific background required for running their projects, and they learned the application of specific chemistry and molecular biology software packages, which were utilized as their research tools,” explained Dr. Alisaraie.

The goal was for the students to gain a better understanding of how the chemistry of drugs directly affects their medicinal properties, and how physics and computer science can serve modern drug discovery.

Ms. Moss said the program helped her get a real sense of what working with science can be like.

“Our project focused on reducing the unwanted side effects and symptoms of anti-cancer drugs used to treat ovarian and breast cancers. The fact that our work was towards a project that will hopefully better drug treatment for cancer patients was very rewarding,” she said.

A typical day involved researching anti-cancer drugs, cataloguing and coding the research into documents, working with computer databases and programs to study chemical structures of drugs and proteins.

“The project was a real-life attempt to fix the problematic side effects of real anti-cancer drugs. We were working towards making a difference in the scientific field and in the lives of cancer patients,” Ms. Moss said.

Since last year, Dr. Alisaraie has been an advocate of the WISE program. This summer she welcomed student Kailey Gillingham to her lab. She plans to offer placements to other students via the program in the future.