A Burnaby high school student says research he helped conduct on garter-snake eyes this summer could lay the groundwork for the creation of bionic contact lenses someday.
Andrew Xia, a Grade 11 student at Burnaby Central Secondary, spent most of July at the University of Saskatchewan in SHAD, a summer program hosted at 12 Canadian universities and aimed at giving exceptional high school students more high-level exposure to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
“In high school science classes, I never really feel challenged,” Xia told the NOW. “It’s like, they give you the content, you learn it, you regurgitate it and it’s done. Here at Shad, I think they opened my eyes up to higher levels of science. I feel like I’m mentally stimulated and I’m presented with challenges to solve.”
Xia was one of 10 students at SHAD Saskatchewan’s 48-student program given an opportunity to conduct research using the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron, a huge, doughnut-shaped ring that accelerates a stream of electrons and manipulates them to create a beam of light billions of times brighter than the sun.
The rare light can then be used by researchers to observe structures and chemical reactions at a molecular level.
Xia and his team decided to study the scales on the eyes of garter snakes.
“Snakes have special spectacle scales,” he said, “and we decided to conduct experiments on that because there’s not a whole lot of research done into spectacle scales.”
Snakes have three layers of scales covering their bodies, Xia explained, but no one has yet conclusively demonstrated that their eyes include the middle layer of scales found on the rest of their bodies.
“We believe that there are special characteristics of the snake-skin eyelids that make it transparent while having those three layers, and there could be correlations between that and the human eye,” Xia said. “There might be a possibility to have it improve human eyesight, but we’re not very sure yet.”
Regardless of the outcome, Xia said his experience at SHAD has been “life changing” and may influence his future career path.
He had planned to pursue law and politics after high school, but science is now vying for consideration as well thanks to SHAD.
“I’m keeping my path open right now,” he said.
Xia was one of 12 Burnaby students in grades 10, 11 and 12 who participated in SHAD from July 5 to 31.
Other local “Shads” were Dani Fookes, Jonathan Han, Michelle Ji, Clara Kim, Charlotte Buttle, Theo Ko, Matthew Cao, Frank Liu, Harleen Julka and Terry Zhang.
The program may sound like hard academic work, but Xia said he had a good time in Saskatchewan.
“There’s lectures and workshops, but there’s also a lot of fun activities,” he said. “It’s like summer camp.”
For more information on the program, which was founded at the University of Waterloo in 1980, visit www.shad.ca.
