Congratulations to our graduate students who have received fellowships.

Two students have received summer fellowships supported by the Devra Kleiman Memorial Graduate Endowment. 

Nicholas Bezio is a second year graduate student, working with Dr. Alexa Bely and Dr. Allen Collins at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Nick is working to unravel the diversity of ctenophores. These comb jellies live in the ocean and can be deep, scarce, and fragile. Nick is traveling the oceans and collecting samples to examine using genetics and microscopy to better characterize ctenophore species. Nick is an experienced scientific illustrator who draws beautiful sketches to document his specimens.

Yanelyn Perez is a third year graduate student working with Dr. Emme Bruns. She studies the trade offs between different pathogen strategies. She is working with carnation flowers from the Alps that are infected by a fungus. Fungal spores are distributed by pollinators and can lead to flowers becoming sterile. She is comparing different fungal lineages which are either generalists or specialists to compare their infectability and the age at which host flowers are impacted. She raises plants both in the UMD greenhouses and nearby fields, performing genetic analyses on thousands of samples.

One student has been selected to receive the Eugenie Clark Fellowship.

Molly Westbrook is a first year graduate student working on cichlid fishes with Dr. Scott Juntti. Adult male cichlids are quite aggressive and defend territories where they hope to mate with females. Molly is studying when in development this male aggression begins and the genetic basis behind its development. By using CRISPR/Cas9 to generate mutant males that are missing potential elements of the aggressive pathway, Molly hopes to unravel which elements are key to turning on aggression. Molly was previously lab manager of the Juntti lab and is an expert in generating CRISPR mutants and performing behavioral assays.