High school senior does UF summer of science

Lover of learning works with graduate students on heart stent project.

Most 7-year-olds come home and watch cartoons all day, but Bobbi-Ann Matheson was a little different.

Sure, she’d watch the occasional Bugs Bunny, but she spent the majority of her free time watching nature documentaries. In fact, she watched some so many times she could rattle off answers to her mother’s obscure questions about whale calves.

Growing up in Jamaica, she wasn’t exposed to much science, but her love of learning propelled her into having a bright young scientific mind.

“Basically, I really like learning,” said Matheson, now a senior at Royal Palm Beach High School. “I guess when I was young I eventually discovered documentaries through channel surfing.”

That love of learning made her decide to give up basically her entire summer for a 7-week biomedical program at the University of Florida this year.

She spent her time in Gainesville living in the dorms and working with graduate students to help do research on a heart stent made out of a polymer instead of the traditional metal.

Sometimes patients’ bodies reject the metal stent, but the polymer wouldn’t be as harsh and eventually was absorbed by the body.

She said the graduate students treated her like an adult, which was an adjustment from her high school peers and routine class schedule.

The experience cemented her love of science and confirmed her interest and passion to work in a lab as a career choice.

“I just wanted to do something, not because it looks good (on a college application), but because I wanted to dive into it (to) find out if I like it,” she said.

She was one of 90 students chosen for the program, and the only black girl from the group.

But Matheson has been adjusting to new challenges her whole life, and she likes it that way.

Coming to the United States from Jamaica with her single mother six years ago, she had an accent and struggled with the transition to middle school at first. But she soon made friends and adjusted.

Matheson was given another challenge when she found out she might not be able to get a full scholarship to pay for the nearly $5,000 program at UF. A teacher told her about GoFundMe and she created a campaign before she even got out of that class. She worked hard in fundraising and had collected $1,500 by the end — just enough to cover the remaining scholarship cost.

She’s still figuring out where she wants to go to college and has already applied to Columbia and Yale along with UF. She said she might want to go farther away to school to get outside of her comfort zone again.

And her dedication to learning is turning some heads.

Sara Day, one of her teachers, said she knew right away Matheson was exceptional. She asked insightful questions that showed she was thinking about the material outside of class.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re talking to a brick wall,” Day said of her classroom duties. “It’s nice to see she was going home and thinking about things.”

Though Matheson has come a long way in both education and distances traveled, she has stayed grounded.

And yes, she still watches nature documentaries in her spare time.