Sophomore Samar Hassouneh was really enjoying Biology 202, so when Professor Dennis Willows began talking about research apprenticeships at the UW’s Friday Harbor Labs, she paid attention. A team of 10 undergraduates, living at Friday Harbor for a whole quarter, would join a multidisciplinary project called Implantable Electrodes and Computers in the Brain. The brain in question was that of a sea slug, and the project’s ultimate goal was to implant a self-contained computer chip that could monitor the neurological activity of a living creature interacting freely with its environment.

Samar was excited by the ambition of the project. “I was trying to decide if I wanted to go into neurobiology, and this seemed like a good way to find out.” She signed on.

From March until June 2001, as spring came to San Juan Island, Samar and her fellow students immersed themselves in their research. “We were living in the woods, the weather was really nice, and we had the whole day just to think about our projects.” First came intensive coaching in basic concepts and techniques; then students paired up to tackle one small piece of the long-term project. Samar and her partner worked on “brain implantation methods for a silicon interface.” By the end of the quarter, they had concrete results—“crucial practical steps in making the project feasible,” says Willows.

Willows started the Friday Harbor apprenticeship program in 1999 with funding from the UW’s Tools for Transformation. For Samar, the experience was “really, really good. It taught me how to conduct research on my own. You have a problem, you think about it, you find out what other people have done, you come up with new ideas, you find something that works, and you just keep going and going and going.”

The quarter also confirmed her interest in neurobiology. Now, with plans for medical school, she’s doing research on traumatic brain injury with a professor of neurological surgery. “The first time I approached him, before I went to Friday Harbor, he said to come back when I knew more. After Friday Harbor, I knew a lot.”