Rebekah Johnson

Rebekah was introduced to PARE during her junior year at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (ASMSA), where she took college-level science courses. Her microbiology course was taught by microbiologist and immunologist Dr. Whitney Holden, who also co-taught Rebekah’s Life Science Capstone course with Dr. Patrycja Krakowiak, chair of ASMSA’s Science Department and a human geneticist.

In the capstone course, students received hands-on experience studying antimicrobial resistance through a citizen science initiative spearheaded by the PARE project. Around 400 colleges and high schools around the world currently participate in PARE.

“We taught Rebekah and her classmates lab skills like sterile sample collection, micropipetting, DNA extraction, PCR, and electrophoresis as we collected information on tetracycline resistance in a few dozen soil samples for PARE,” says Dr. Holden. “It was Rebekah’s idea to merge her passion for supporting educational outreach at the Little Rock Zoo with the PARE citizen science work.” 

Rebekah advocated to stakeholders at the zoo and was awarded a permit for her work. She set up an educational table on AMR in the environment and interacted with nearly 300 zoo visitors. These guests and staff were invited to take soil sample collection kits with them into the zoo and collect samples to be brought back and used for testing. Rebekah plans to test the returned kits for tetracycline resistance with resources provided by a grant from ASMSA's Foundation.

Rebekah will process up to 20 samples provided by guests and zookeepers to look for tetB and tetM genes. She will upload the results to the Tufts PARE website and will present her findings in a meeting with Little Rock Zoo staff and volunteers later this year. 

“While this is not a part of my capstone project, this is my passion project,” says Rebekah. “I wanted to work on something that could spark real change and educate people.”

She will submit her findings to the Regeneron Science Talent Search later this fall. 

“I am enormously proud of Rebekah for making this project come to fruition,” says Dr. Holden. “It is one thing to have a passion for citizen science and a desire to do something good. It is another thing for Rebekah to leverage her existing zoo connections to develop an entire project, from proposal to permit application to sample collection to hours of lab work and actually pull it off, all before graduating from high school. To the best of our knowledge, Rebekah is the only high school student to ever pursue a project of this magnitude with PARE, and we at ASMSA are very proud of her.”

Per Dr. Bascom-Slack, “this level of initiative by a high school student is exceptional and exactly the sort of engagement promoted by CIMAR.” Rebekah’s zoo project exemplifies the Levy CIMAR’s mission to promote stewardship and awareness within a One Health framework.

"What I love the most about Rebekah is her passion for discovery and drive to get things done,” adds Dr. Krakowiak. “As antibiotic resistance is such a global threat and yet so overlooked by most, it warms my heart that she finds it fascinating and worth pursuing, especially in such an important and delicate ecosystem as that of zoos. I am very hopeful about the future because of students like Rebekah to help our world thrive."

Rebekah is now a senior at ASMSA. After graduation, she plans to attend college as a biology major on a pre-medical track. Later, she hopes to join an MD-PhD program to further her research. 

“Being at ASMSA has encouraged me to push myself beyond my comfort zone,” says Rebekah. “Working with my mentors at ASMSA and the Tufts PARE project, I have learned that it is always possible to combine interests into something new and unique. This is something I know I will carry with me and will affect my decisions and interests in years to come.”