Upward Bound Math & Science Summer STEM Academy

Upward Bound is a federally funded program designed to provide support and opportunities for high school students from low-income families and high school students from families in which neither parent holds a bachelor’s degree.  Penn State’s Upward Bound Math & Science (UBMS) Program assists students from Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Reading and Pittsburgh area high schools with recognizing their academic potential and cultivating interest in STEM professions through hands-on experience during the UBMS Summer STEM Academy.  This six-week summer program provides students with the opportunity to take coursework designed to prepare students for postsecondary education.  As part of this program, students have the opportunity to conduct research projects with mentors at Penn State.

Summer 2015

Along with my friend and colleague Jared Smith, the department's Teaching Laboratory Manager, I served as a research mentor for three young women from the Harrisburg and Pittsburg areas.  Our project was titled “What’s Up With Gluten?” and was an investigation of the impact of gluten content on bread quality.  

After a primary investigation of the impact of gluten formation on bread quality in wheat flour, we then tasked our students to formulate gluten-free breads using flours from different grains- sorghum, teff, quinoa, rice and rice plus xanthan gum- and measure the impact that these grains had on color, texture, volume and taste compared to a wheat bread control. Using a variety of laboratory techniques including colorimetry and texture analysis of both the crust and crumb of each bread, the students found that while the crust crispness was not affected by the type of flour used, there were significant difference in compressibility between the wheat control and some of the treatments. Breads made from teff, rice flour and sorghum all required greater force to compress the crumb.

The students presented these results at a research symposium at Penn State, giving a 10 minute talk about their experiments and findings, concluding with hypotheses for future work which included ideas about how to combine a variety of gluten-free flours to create a gluten-free bread that had qualities similar to wheat bread in terms of color, texture and taste. 
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Interacting with these intelligent, creative and enthusiastic young scientists was an incredible opportunity that only instilled further my desire to teach and share my passion for food science with students of all ages. The icing on the (gluten-free) cake? Their project won first place for the College of Agricultural Sciences Division.

Read a news release about this program from Texture Technologies here.

Summer 2016

Coming soon.