In a chilly trailer-turned-science-lab at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, around 30 San Antonio high school students in lab coats and safety goggles are clustered around tables extracting DNA from soil samples — hunting for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The Valero Young Scientist Program at Texas Biomed attracts dozens of San Antonio high school students who spend four weeks of their summer at the institute doing lab work and researching infectious diseases.
This year’s cohort is 60 students, nearly double the number of students from 2024, when the program started.
The majority of students are from high schools in underserved areas of San Antonio, and nearly 75% of them are female. Women and minorities are underrepresented in STEM fields.
The program was made possible by a three-year, $1.5 million grant from Valero. Texas Biomed and Valero are now working on a plan to extend it through 2029, though nothing has yet been finalized.
‘Science is all about discovery’
High school students accepted into the program spend four weeks of their summer vacation at Texas Biomed’s campus on the far west side, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week.
Their workloads resemble those of biology graduate students, conducting lab experiments and working in groups to research a pathogen — each giving presentations on their findings to their classmates and to scientists who research that pathogen professionally at Texas Biomed at the end of the program.
“They’re being trained to become researchers, and that’s pretty powerful,” said Brian Quinones, who oversees the lab work and works as a science teacher at Fox Tech High School. “It’s not a skill that you can pick up from a high school environment. It’s not a skill you can pick up from college either.”
Sohayla Amorollah, an incoming senior at Veterans Memorial High School, came into this year’s program shy, anxious and unsure of what career path she was interested in pursuing as she gears up for college.
Presenting research findings to her classmates helped her break out of her shell, and she found the lab work more enjoyable than she expected. “I got the zoomies from it,” she said. “I was on a high, it was so fun.”
Many of the hands-on lab experiments that happen in high school science classrooms are what Dr. Rosemary Riggs refers to as “recipe labs.”
“They know what the answer is going to be, and if the student doesn’t get the answer, it’s not correct,” said Riggs, a former high school science teacher for 10 years who now directs K-12 outreach at Texas Biomed.
That’s largely because schools often don’t have the resources and teachers the time to conduct proper experiments and demonstrate the highs and lows of actual lab work, she added.
“What the kids are learning here is that science is all about discovery,” Riggs continued. “They’re going into a lab not knowing what the answer is because that’s what happens in science. They are developing that curiosity and that inquisitiveness.”
The experience also gives students an understanding of what career opportunities are out there in STEM other than the conventional paths. About half of the students come to the program interested in pre-med, Riggs estimates. Over the course of the summer, many of them realize their passions lie more in research.
That was the case for Sohaib-Ryan Al-ghoul, an incoming senior at Basis Shavano Public Charter school who originally had his eyes set on a pre-med track for college.
“I just want to get into labs and do more research,” he said. “And I think this program really helped me realize my passion for that.”
Texas Biomed also offers several internship tracks for college students, the next stage in the research institute’s efforts to build a local STEM workforce and keep those students in the community.
“We call it Cradle to Career,” Texas Biomed President Dr. Larry Schlesinger said. “That starts at K-12, but it doesn’t end there. It continues at the level of undergraduates and graduates and postdocs. The whole chain of training that allows the next generation of scientists to evolve.”
Whether these kinds of investments pay off is a question public policy and education researchers have only recently started to measure.
Sarah Cohodes, a public policy researcher at the University of Michigan, authored a study published in 2026 examining the effectiveness of one summer STEM program hosted at an elite university in the Northeast aimed at getting underrepresented students into the STEM pipeline.
Her research found that participants in summer STEM programs were more likely to graduate on time from selective colleges, stick with STEM majors and raise their predicted earnings by 3 to 15%.
It’s hard to say how much the findings might apply to different programs, but she pointed to two takeaways she considered broadly relevant: reaching students before college matters most, and where a student lands is important.
That’s because institutions with stronger graduation rates tend to keep students on track in STEM even after academic setbacks.
“It is very easy to fall off that path. You get a C-plus, or a bad test… and then you decide that it’s not for you,” Cohodes said. “Something about experiencing this program, or the institutions the students ended up at, gave them the support to persist and stay in those STEM majors.”
For teachers like Riggs, what matters most is what she watches happen in each of the students every summer.
“They come in with questions about science,” she said, “but now they’ve turned into advocates for science, and I think that’s critically important.”
