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Connecticut students are helping Stanford researchers look for a cure for diabetes.

November 2025

Until last fall, Nellie Kenney was not especially passionate about science as she was more invested in literature and humanities classes. Naiya Sabbagh was already interested in science — but never envisioned she would be doing collegiate level lab work as a high school senior that might lead to a cure for diabetes.

After taking a brand new molecular genetics research course as seniors at The Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, the two young women were among 10 students there that helped conduct lab work that’s being used in diabetes research. The class is now in its second year with a new group of 10 students. Sabbagh is now a freshman at Rollins College and Kenney is at Yale.

“Taking this class absolutely transformed what I thought about science and how I thought about myself as a student,” Kenney says.

In the nine-month course modeled after the Stan-X experimental biology course created by Stanford University professor Dr. Seung Kim and working in conjunction with his lab, students did advanced research usually undertaken by graduate students or professors, Dr. Meera Viswanathan, Ethel Walker’s head of school, says.

“We are delighted that the leadership, teachers and students at Ethel Walker have embraced our curricular innovations for science, and even in the very first year of the Stan-X course, have generated several novel fruit fly strains,” Dr. Kim said via email. “This experience-based instruction has helped students engage with science in a genuine way — including failures and sweet moments of insight. After further studies, these new flies could eventually serve as crucial tools for making scientific discoveries — a true connection and lasting contribution to the community of science.”

One of the students at The Ethel
Walker School in Simsbury who
is participating in a research
project with Stanford University
professor Seung Kimand his lab
to and a cure for diabetes.

Students in about 20 secondary level institutions, including The Ethel Walker School and Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, are in this program, helping scientific researchers develop a cure for diabetes by creating new strains of fruit flies. Fruit flies used in research, such as measuring insulin levels, are sent for cold storage to Indiana University where scientists can access them.“It’s a very complex system whereby they are given fruit fly eggs, which they then hatch and nurture and they have to sort into male and female,” Viswanathan explains. “They then have to identify certain characteristics and crossbreed to try to bring those characteristics into the offspring of every generation. They succeeded in doing this in five strains. ”Sabbagh says she gained far more than science know-how. “Looking back on the class, what resonated with me the most was all the information I gained.

I knew upon applying that I would be more aware of the workings of DNA in a cell on a molecular level and begin to understand how important functional DNA really is,” Sabbagh says. “What I did not know was that I would also be learning to understand how to dissect professional scientific papers, and be working in so many different labs that aren’t specific to just education in school.” Scientific progress was not linear or easy as Kenney recalls. “The very first week, we found mites in some of our vials of fly eggs so those vials were contaminated. It was a whole process, but we got through it, and we ended up having a lot of success. It was very much a lesson in learning to deal with setbacks and failure, and learning that can be part of the process of learning, which is very valuable.” According to The Ethel Walker School’s course description, the class is centered on lab research, and students take care of and study fruit flies by using transposon biology to develop transgenic fruit flies with favorable characteristics passed down to the offspring. “Favorable strains of 􀀗ies made and characterized by students will be used by researchers in Dr. Kim’s lab and made available to all scientists working on fruit flies,” Dr. Viswanathan says. She adds students will soon be able to be involved in gene sequencing and hopefully gene editing.

There is a next generation course that Dr. Kim has developed that some of the 20 schools are already using. “It is a CRISPR (a gene-editing tool) course so there are students actually doing cutting edge gene editing, which at the high school level is pretty rare except for Seung’s program. I’m hoping ours is next year,” she says. Sabbagh says she was eager to take this class to and answers that might help people. “Whether it be a cure, a diagnosis or even an improvement to modern medicine, a good answer has a lot of power,” she says. “I wanted to get involved in this course to help find that answer. Along with the preparation it gave me for a STEM major in college, the idea of contributing even a piece of the research needed to possibly cure diabetes was so rewarding.

To imagine how many more lives a cure for diabetes could improve made me feel a responsibility to use my passion for science to not just better my future but better humanity’s future.” Kenney says the class changed her outlook on science. “In so many ways, I’m sure it will color my future. I think the first and most important thing that it showed me was that science was ongoing, and something I could actually contribute to and involve myself in,” she said. “I have always been interested in the humanities in part because ... for a lot of my time in middle school and high school, I had this idea of science as stagnant. Taking this class really showed me it is not stagnant but developing and changing all the time and something I can do and that was really empowering and wonderful.” Sabbagh explains that going into college as a biochem major on a premed track, she knew this class would be quite an opportunity, but it also pushed her to be more independent. “I think learning to teach yourself information is a very useful thing. We know how to teach ourselves so many things,” she says. “What molecular genetics did was force us to have the moti- vation to ask our teachers for help, dig deeper into the topics we learned about and start to not focus just on getting an A+ but also learn how to speak about the topic with enough knowledge to even teach or explain it to people that are not affiliated with molecular genetics.”

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Detroit Country Day students get hands-on genetics training through Stanford program

November 2025
Beverly Hills — Detroit Country Day School senior Abby Pernick gives the plastic tube a swift tap-tap-tap on the countertop, sending dozens of fruit flies tumbling to the bottom of the cylinder.

Skipping that step would have a less-than-desirable result: a fruit-fly jailbreak.

Pernick's next step, which she demonstrated in her school's lab on Tuesday, is totake the top off the tube, then quickly dump its contents into a clean one filled withfresh, yummy, fruit fly sustenance. With a flick of the wrist, the fruit flies aredeposited into their new home.

Later, those flies get to take an extended nap as students dose their lab subjects with carbon dioxide, a fruit-fly anesthetic, and examine them under a microscope.

Detroit Country Day School is one of just 20 schools across the country, and thefirst in Michigan, performing genetic research with fruit flies through a partnershipwith Stanford University in California. The program, called Stan-X, trains highschool teachers to run research labs and teach classes around real-world researchthat can be of use to scientists around the world.

Among the schools participating in Stan-X are the Lawrenceville School, a privatehigh school in New Jersey, and the Phillips Exeter Academy, a private high school in New Hampshire. But there are public schools, such as Seneca High SchoolMagnet Career Academy in Louisville, Kentucky.

Students in Stan-X labs not only map the genomes of their flies, but also mate themwith other flies to create new genetic lines of the insects that can be used in researcharound illnesses such as diabetes.

Pernick, who wants to be a veterinarian one day and to continue studying genetics,said what she liked most about the class was the hands-on learning and figuring outthe "puzzle" of genetics.

"It just really made my brain work in ways that it's never had to before, piecing allof these details that I know together and not being told how it works," she said."And when I finally figured it out, it was like the most light-bulb moment."

Getting research experience

Allison Liddane, the school's Stan-X lab manager and instructor, said the lab is anopportunity for students to experience their learning, not just study for a test or goto a class and take notes.

"It's understanding the process," Liddane said. "I think a lot of it is theunderstanding, like, things are not going to go perfectly, and you have to be ready toadapt."

Under the Stan-X program, schools provide the money for the class equipment andteachers. Stanford and sometimes its partner schools help to guide prospectiveschools through the planning and costs for adopting the Stan-X curriculum. "Stan-X leadership will also cheerfully participate in fund-raising activities, if necessary,"according to the program's website.

Stanford works with participating high schools to shape its various course segmentsinto a specific curriculum for those schools.

Liddane was a college biology major who worked in a cancer research lab for fouryears. The Stan-X lab, she said, strongly resembles her former professional lab.

She launched the lab last school year in the spring and brought on new biologyteacher Chandler Tawney.

Tawney said the goal of the lab, aside from its scientific purposes, is to provide allstudents at the school access to the research experience at the high school level.

Many students at the private school in Oakland County have connections or accessto labs at Wayne State University or the University of Michigan, often through theirparents, she said. But not all students have that opportunity.

"We're trying to make this an equitable experience, that even if they haven't had anylab work or they don't have a connection to a lab, they still get the researchexperience in class during a block," Tawney said. "They don't need any otherconnections."

Director of the Upper School John Corrigan said the class is also a way for studentsto continue their science education even if an Advanced Placement class is not thebest fit for them. He said he walked into the Stan-X lab and wondered, "Where wasthis when I was in high school?"

"This would have been right up my alley, versus sitting at a desk taking notes,preparing for a test," he said.

How the program started

Stanford professor Dr. Seung Kim, founder and director of Stan-X, said he createdthe program after visiting his own children's high school science classes.

"I saw that they were learning science like I had in the K-12 phase, which wasthrough reading and memorization and recitation and not through doingexperiments," said Kim, who is a professor of developmental biology and medicine."So that struck me as being an appalling lack of progress in my lifetime."

Any experiments they were doing, he said, had a correct answer. That struck him as,well, anti-science.

"Science is about discovery and exploring unknown things," Kim said.

He first worked with his own alma mater, the elite private high school PhillipsExeter, which had a new lab but needed a new curriculum for scientificexperiments. The fruit fly, he said, was the perfect subject of study because of itsusefulness in scientific research, but also its low cost to acquire and maintain.

Kim visited Detroit Country Day's program last year as it was getting off the ground.

Students in the Stan-X programs track the qualities of certain groups of fruit flies,including their sex, eye size and color, wing shape and the amount of hair stubble.

Through mapping these qualities and dividing the flies into groups to mate, thestudents can watch those traits fade or change through the generations and createnew genetic strains of fruit flies. Those flies are then sent to Indiana University,which houses 93,000 strains of fruit flies at the Bloomington Drosophila StockCenter, a warehouse of fruit flies.

Students have to apply to the program, showing a strong interest in the work itself,not necessarily what it will do for their college transcripts, said Liddane, CountryDay's lab manager.

Three new students to the Stan-X program said they wanted to take the classbecause of how similar it is to what they will experience in their first years ofcollege.

"It's definitely cool to work in a lab because I know I'll be doing that in the future,"said JJ Samani, a senior who wants to be an orthopedic surgeon.

Senior Victoria Wang said her other classes have offered her some lab experience.

But "it's never working with actual live things, especially flies," she said. "That'sreally new. And you get to see them actually change as you go through the crosses."

Haochen Tian said the goal is to isolate specific genes, to "trap" them, to betterunderstand what each one does.

"We still don't know a lot about exact genes and proteins," he said.

The lab space used to be a storage closet between two classrooms. Detroit CountryDay raised the money to overhaul it into a Stan-X space, complete with brightlights, microscopes and carbon dioxide tanks. Every once in a while, a student willsmack the table hard — an indication that a fruit fly has tried to escape.

Pernick said her family jokingly blames her anytime they see a fruit fly around thehouse. She gets a lot of raised eyebrows when she tells people she gets to doresearch with fruit flies, the kind of creature that, it must be said, no one likes.Except maybe Pernick.

"It doesn't gross me out," she said. "Didn't really bug me. I thought it was reallycool. When I tell people about it, they don't react as excited as I am."

jpignolet@detroitnews.com