The grads of UW Biology will be spending the next few months diving into their research and soaking up some of that delicious and outrageous Seattle sunshine.
Brandon Peecook: “I’ll be land-cruisin’ around Africa collecting 1/4 billion year old fossils, discerning patterns of extinction and recovery, and trying to not be eaten by several known man-eaters.”
(Dr.) Kelsey Byers: “I’ll be traipsing around the Alps collecting floral scent and tissue from alpine orchids!”
Jack Cerchiara: “I’ll be spending my summer studying the physiology of aging in Magellanic penguins.”
Jake Cooper: “I’ll be modeling how sex with neighbors is different from sex with randos.”
Yasmeen Hussain: “I’ll be watching sperm swim and making (urchin) babies.”
Michael Dorrity: “I’ll be pitting millions of yeast against each other in fiercely competitive agar-digging tournaments.”
Stephanie Crofts: “I’ll be playing with fish and finding new ways to crush shells.”
David DeMar Jr.: “I’ll be the field crew chief in northeastern Montana for the Hell Creek III project with hopes of finding a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton for the UW Burke Museum.”
Melissa Eng: “I’ll be collecting time lapse images of developing fruit fly larvae to understand what contributes to maintained distinction between axons and dendrites (transmitters and receivers of information).”
Derek Smith: “I’ll be following up on 2300-year-old benthic settlement experiments started by ancient Greek and Roman sailors when their ships and artifacts went down throughout the Mediterranean Sea.”
Joshua Swore: “I’ll be looking at and comparing babies… baby invertebrates found in the Puget Sound while they develop.”
Leander Love-Anderegg: “I’ll be exploring how Rocky Mountain forests deal with drought by shooting trees with a shotgun.”
Stephanie Smith: “I am going to dig up some tiny fossil teeth and help Dave find that T. rex that he wants so much. “
Casey Self: “Defending, then starting a project measuring cranial suture patency in adult humans”
Jennifer Day: “I’ll be watching digital critters make babies.”
Jonathan Calede: “I’ll be spending part of my summer digging up western Montana for fossil mammals and another part of it looking at gopher skulls. Lots of burrowing and burrowers!”
Emily Grason: “I’ll be trying to guess what snails are thinking, and cleaning up lots of crab poop – and maybe doing some hiking.”
Myles Fenske: “I’m spending my summer making petunias glow in the dark–to a rhythm!”
Emily Bain: “I’ll be checking out expression of pigment cell genes in zebrafish and drinking lots of beer on a boat on Lake Washington.”
Sweta Agrawal: “Seducing flies with magnets wasn’t enough — this summer, I’ll be adding lasers to my system, so I can start to CONTROL FLY MINDS.”
Matthew George: “I’ll be yanking critters off of rocks.”
Shawn Luttrell: “I’ll be here on campus doing a ton of in situ hybridization and staining of neural tissue in regenerating hemichordates.”
Katrina van Raay: “I’ll be watching one of the world’s smallest animals eat tiny multicellular algae from the inside out.”
Charles Beightol: “I’ll be in Zambia hunting prehistoric big game therapsids, and then finish off the summer at Petrified Forest National Park, AZ searching for lost croc relatives!”
Ian Breckheimer: “I’ll be torturing alpine plants on Mt. Rainier, where only the strong survive!”
Laura Newcomb: “I’ll be pulling mussels off of aquaculture lines on board a mussel harvesting boat to help me understand how elevated temperature and ocean acidification may weaken mussel attachment strength.”
Lauren Debey: “I’ll be taking undergraduate students and K-12 teachers to Montana to dig for dinosaurs.”
Lauren Vandepas: “I’ll be subjecting the ctenophore Pleurobrachia bachei to immune challenges to characterize the innate immune system of a basal animal group and enjoying the gorgeousness that is summer at Friday Harbor Labs.”
Jiae Lee: “I’ll be zapping the fly neuron with a laser to find out what happens inside them with overcoming the pain and struggling to grow back.”
Melissa Steele-Ogus: “I’m going to be indoctrinating undergrads in assisting me in my nefarious schemes to take over the world! Er, I mean, I’m going to quietly work on my research and not plot any sort of mad science.”
Alexander Lowe: “I’ll be recording eelgrass and oysters (De-?)acidifying the ocean.”
Rochelle Kelly: “I’ll be studying bat ecology on the San Juan Islands this summer.”
Audrey Ragsac: “I’ll be taking a course on tropical botany in Miami.”
Leith Miller: “I’ll be microCT scanning bat nose leaves and ears, as well as getting elbow deep in mammal masticatory muscles.”
Aric Rininger: “I’m going to spend this summer watching weeds grow and taping leaves to microscope slides.”
Edith Pierre-Jerome: “This summer I will be be gene cloning, gene cloning, and maybe do some more gene cloning.”
Itzue Caviedes Solis: “I will spend my summer under the stars walking along the rivers looking for frogs in Mexican forest!”
Matthew McElroy: “This summer I’ll be sequencing DNA from Puerto Rican lizards in order to study physiology and population differentiation.”
CJ Battey: “I’m in Mexico surveying the avian biodiversity of the mountains of southeastern Nuevo León.”
Frazer Meacham: “I’ll be speculating on some problems in fields only vaguely related to biology, while using some math.”
William Hardin: “I’ll be taking movies of reproducing Giardia, while listening to Pandora.”
Eliza Heery: “I’ll be sorting through worms, clams, snails and more in sediment samples from an experiment I’m running off of Alki Beach.”
Jared Grummer: “I’ll be collecting and analyzing genomic data of western North American lizards and frogs, while preparing for and subsequently presenting at the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Tennessee!”
