The awardees and honorable mentions for the 2017 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program competition were recently posted and several Biology students were recognized out of the 13,000 applicants received.
Cell & Molecular Biology PhD student, Leah Williams of the Gilmore Lab, was awarded a 3-year Graduate Research Fellowship. Leah will be working towards exploring the involvement of the immune-related transcription factor NF-kappaB pathway in an endangered coral, Orbicella faveolata, in hopes to provide a molecular explanation for how coral bleaching occurs. She will also be continuing her outreach as a mentor to undergraduates and high school students in the NSF-REU and GROW programs at BU.
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ncoming Fall 2017 Ecology, Behavior & Evolution PhD student, Brandon Güell joining the Warkentin Lab, was awarded a 3-year Graduate Research Fellowship. He will be focusing on elucidating how and why closely related species exhibit diverse phenotypic responses. Specifically, he is interested in examining the evolution and mechanisms which underlie plastic traits in treefrogs throughout Central America. He plans on conducting comparative analysis of the ontogeny of mechanisms underlying adaptive plastic hatching in phellomedusine treefrogs. He is interested in adaptive phenotypic plasticity, animal behavior, cue use, and predator-prey interactions.
Biology & Science Education undergraduate, Joanna Lee of the Finnerty Lab, was awarded a 3-year Graduate Research Fellowship. Joanna created transcriptomes for the economically crucial queen conch, Lobatus gigas in order to find morphological and genetic differences between two hypothesized morphs of L. gigas to guide management strategies. Starting fall 2017 she will be joining the PhD program in Biology in the Finnerty lab.
Biology PhD student, Jamie Harrison of the Templer Lab, received Honorable Mention recognition based on her application titled “Effects of Climate Change Across Seasons on Nitrogen Cycling and Net Primary Productivity of a Northern Hardwood Forest.”
We congratulate these students for their achievements!