SCHOOLS · WEST BABYLON

Most graduates come back to their old high school for a reunion or a football game. Vamsi Parikh came back with bananas and a needle.

Parikh graduated from West Babylon Senior High School in 2024. On October 6 he returned to Mrs. Prizzi’s Anatomy and Physiology classes, now as an undergraduate at Stony Brook University, with his research teammate Melody Touranant.

The two are on Stony Brook’s team for iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. Every year, undergraduate teams design their own synthetic biology project, work on it through the spring and summer, and then present it at the international iGEM Jamboree.

This year Stony Brook is working on biofilms, the layers bacteria build up on surfaces. The team is engineering a plasmid, a small loop of DNA, meant to break biofilms down as they form. The aim is a preventative approach after surgery, according to the district.

Then came the hands-on part. Parikh and Touranant taught the students basic suturing, the stitches used to close a wound, using a banana in place of skin.

The district says the point was to connect what students study in Anatomy and Physiology to real research, and to show them the role biofilms can play in surgical care. Community education and outreach are part of the iGEM experience too, the district notes, and Parikh took his into the classroom he had sat in two years earlier.

That is the quieter lesson. The distance between a high school lab bench and university research turned out to be one graduating class. For a West Babylon student holding a needle over a banana, that is a short enough distance to picture crossing.

Source: West Babylon UFSD, “Hands-On Science Lesson in Suturing,” October 19, 2026