Training High School Students in Evolutionary Biology along-side REU Interns.

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This proposal would provide to two local high school students an opportunity to work in cutting edge research in the summer of 2012 for a period of 9 weeks. Both students have been identified and have already engaged in volunteer research at the American Museum of Natural History. The students will pursue novel research questions on a full time basis and in concert with ongoing summer research. One research project will involve systematics of the leech family Haemadipsidae. New species descriptions will be accomplished employing legacy collections and recent material in a natural history collection. For the second project, evolutionary relationships and species boundaries within the order Actiniaria will be evaluated, in particular from those of polar and deep-sea chemosynthetic environments using nuclear and mitochondrial gene sequences.This activity will provide an excellent research experience for the high school students. It will also result in a presentation or publication of the research results.