- Seniors Mae Lacey, Paige Collins and Nigel Ravida are getting ready to graduate in a few short months. All are looking to continue in biology! Mae will spend the summer working with endangered roseate terns off the coast of CT, and Paige and Nigel are both seeking research positions in labs.
- Mae presented her research on the effects of microclimate on kittiwake reproductive success at SICB in January, opting to give an oral presentation instead of the more traditional (for undergraduates) poster – she delivered a graduate-level talk that made us proud! She’s working on her honors thesis on the same research, which she will defend in April.
- Paige Collins (’18) is preparing a talk for Bucknell’s Kalman symposium where she will present research that the whole lab worked on last year, genetically sexing nearly 70 kittiwake chicks to understand how age, sex and chick status affect growth and survival of chicks exposed to acute reductions in food availability.
- Paige Collins and Nigel Ravida (’18) are both working to extract RNA from whole kittiwake blood, identify focal genes and design qPCR primers to evaluate the effects of acute food shortages on gene expression in adult kittiwakes.
- Paige Caine (’21) is spending spring learning how to run EIAs to quantify hormones and preparing to spend a few weeks on Middleton Island, AK this summer, studying whole free-living kittiwakes instead of just working with samples in the lab!
- Manya Saaraswat (’19) has been neck-deep in video footage of feisty kittiwake chicks, building an ethogram to quantify begging, feeding and aggressive behaviors, in an effort to identify predictors of siblicide.
- Katie Edwards (’19) is making the most of her semester in Scotland, exploring culture, history and science all over Edinburgh, but still planning her summer kittiwake bioinformatics project.
- Abby Joseph (’19) officially joined the lab this Spring, and is also learning how to run EIAs. She’s working on a follow-up experiment to strengthen the data for our developmental fadrozole exposure project.