On March 26th Sylvia YONG, a Fulbright grantee, arrived in Mulhouse at Lycée Albert Schweitzer where she held a conference on her research entitled “From a disease-causing agent to a tool : tinkering of a toxin”.
I would like to thank the Fulbright Commission for making this visit possible and Sylvia for accepting my invitation and for making her stay in Alsace so special !
My deepest thanks to my Principal Mr Philippe Provence for supporting my initiative and to my colleagues Mrs Nguyen, Mrs Pellegrin, Mr Fraysse, Mr Nass and Mr Ribeaucourt for welcoming her.
One hundred and sixty students, high school students in their final year and also students from Classes Préparatoires Scientifiques, listened to her and showed remarkable interest in the subject. They asked a lot of questions about her research but also more general questions about her studies, her home university in the US, and about the laboratory in the “ Institut Pasteur” in Paris where she is currently spending a year for her research.
She told our French students about the four year undergraduate studies that students pursue in the US directly after high school and the differing time frames of France and America concerning specialization. She has already completed her undergraduate studies at Notre-Dame in America and she will go to medical school this year. Our students appreciated the quality of the documents she presented and she made a lot of analogies to adapt to the different levels of the students who were listening to her. Sylvia was extremely generous and amazing.