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 to take the top off the tube, then quickly dump its contents into a clean one filled with fresh, yummy, fruit fly sustenance. With a flick of the wrist, the fruit flies are deposited 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 the first in Michigan, performing genetic research with fruit flies through a partnership with Stanford University in California. The program, called Stan-X, trains high school teachers to run research labs and teach classes around real-world research that can be of use to scientists around the world.

Among the schools participating in Stan-X are the Lawrenceville School, a private high 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 School Magnet Career Academy in Louisville, Kentucky.

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

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

"It just really made my brain work in ways that it's never had to before, piecing all of 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 an opportunity for students to experience their learning, not just study for a test or go to a class and take notes.

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

Under the Stan-X program, schools provide the money for the class equipment and teachers. Stanford, along with its partner schools, helps guide prospective schools through the planning and costs associated with 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 collaborates with participating high schools to tailor its various course segments into a customized curriculum for those schools.

Liddane was a college biology major who worked in a cancer research lab for four years. 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 biology teacher Chandler Tawney.

Tawney said the goal of the lab, aside from its scientific purposes, is to provide all students 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 access to labs at Wayne State University or the University of Michigan, often through their parents, 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 any lab work or they don't have a connection to a lab, they still get the research experience in class during a block," Tawney said. "They don't need any other connections."

Director of the Upper School John Corrigan said the class is also a way for students to continue their science education even if an Advanced Placement class is not the best fit for them. He said he walked into the Stan-X lab and wondered, "Where was this 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 created the program after visiting his own children's high school science classes.

"I saw that they were learning science as I had in the K-12 phase, which was through reading and memorization and recitation and not through doing experiments," 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 scientific experiments. The fruit fly, he said, was the perfect subject of study because of its usefulness 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, the students can watch those traits fade or change through the generations and create new 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, Country Day's lab manager.

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

"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's really 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 better understand 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 Country Day raised the money to overhaul it into a Stan-X space, complete with bright lights, microscopes, and carbon dioxide tanks. Every once in a while, a student will smack 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 the house. She gets a lot of raised eyebrows when she tells people she gets to do research 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 really cool. When I tell people about it, they don't react as excited as I am."

jpignolet@detroitnews.com