BAR HARBOR — Like Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, one day Joe Barter may look back on time spent at The Jackson Laboratory as the seminal experience of a distinguished career in scientific research.

Joe Barter—Ellsworth American Photo by Tom Walsh

Barter grew up in Pretty Marsh. While attending Mount Desert Island High School, he participated in the Lab’s after-school internship program as a junior and senior and was selected for the Summer Student Program in the months before he began working on his undergraduate degree at Macalester.

“I was a high school intern, and I would drive over here every day after lunch,” he said. “I heard it was a good thing to do, and I applied. I got accepted, I showed up and I loved it. I knew I was interested in science, but I didn’t know what area. The more I was here, the more I grew to love biology.”

Barter has been back every summer since to work at the Lab, except last summer, when he accepted a visual neuroscience fellowship at the University of Rochester. He recently applied for graduate school admission at Dartmouth, University of California/Santa Barbara and Harvard University. He’s well aware that having a letter of recommendation from Simon John, a prominent Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, won’t hurt his chances of getting into the school of his choice.

“Right now, the grad programs that I’m applying to focus on cognitive neuroscience,” he said. “It’s an area that explains things like culture and personality and things that psychology has traditionally tried to explain but has traditionally failed at because it’s not hard science like cognitive neuroscience is, as it involves looking at the brain.”

“It’s good to be surrounded by real scientists, who you see are passionate about it and who you can talk to. This kind of environment is very different from a science classroom, where you’re learning it from a text. Here, you see it as a process, rather than a set of facts.” — Joe barter, student lab assistant,

“Having been exposed to such good science here, I began to realize that science is something that can be applied to everything,” he said. “I learned about evolution and how that connects to genes, which is what we study here.

“I got really passionate about what science is capable of explaining. It was here that I grew to love it and I learned to apply science to things that it’s not been applied to. It’s all very simple; it’s just looking for a cause and effect. And, as far as I understand it, it’s really the only way to make sense of anything.”

He encourages high school and college students aspiring to science careers to see what The Jackson Laboratory has to offer.

“For students with an interest in science, this is a great program. It’s good to be surrounded by real scientists who you see are passionate about it and who you can talk to. This kind of environment is very different from a science classroom where you’re learning it from a text. Here, you see it as a process, rather than a set of facts. That’s what attracted me to the field as a whole.”