The Department of Biology is excited to announce the three recipients of this year’s Dr. Marion R. Kramer Scholarships: Nicola Kriefall of the Davies Lab, GPN PhD student Lisa Kretsge of the Cruz-Martin Lab, and Zoey Werbin of the Bhatnagar Lab.
Nicola Kriefall is interested in understanding how reef environments affect corals and their symbioses with microscopic organisms. Conditions on the reef change depending on the scale that you examine – sites just a few meters apart can have vastly different temperatures and salinity changes day to day. The first and second chapter of her dissertation compare the algal and bacterial communities hosted by corals across environments located closer to shore (typically more variable in terms of conditions like temperature) and further from shore (typically more stable) in French Polynesia and in Florida (USA). Her third chapter is a tank experiment that isolates daily thermal variability from other factors that differ across reef environments and asks how this variation structures coral microorganismal communities. By asking these types of questions, she aims to better understand whether microbes can play an important role in coral acclimatization to environmental shifts under climate change.
Lisa Kretsge is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program for Neuroscience working in the Cruz-Martin laboratory. Her research aims to better understand how the cortex is able to encode such diverse, behaviorally-relevant information. She uses calcium imaging and miniaturized microscopes to record neural activity with cellular resolution in awake, behaving mice. Lisa is particularly interested in a specific type of inhibitory interneuron (VIP cells) in the anterior cingulate cortex (VIP-ACC). Her data shows that VIP-ACC cells are functionally heterogeneous: distinct subpopulations preferentially activate either to anxiety-related, social, or non-social stimuli. This informs our understanding of how VIP-ACC cells function during behavior and how a given cortical region can encode diverse types of information.
Zoey Werbin’s research focuses on the diverse communities of micro-organisms that live in soil. Soil fungi and bacteria are responsible for cycling important nutrients like carbon and nitrogen, and different organisms work together to carry out biogeochemical functions. Zoey built models of these communities to forecast how microbes respond to abiotic conditions like soil chemistry, temperature, and moisture. She is currently developing metabolic network models to explore the role of species interactions within soil biogeochemical cycles. Overall, her work aims to help elucidate the complex and mysterious relationships between soil microbes and environmental change.
This award provides support for high-achieving female students majoring in Biology. The award was established in 2001 in honor of Dr. Marion Kramer who earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Boston University in 1963 and went on to a long and satisfying career in biology and medicine.
The Department of Biology gives this award to graduate students in the spring, and to undergraduate students in the fall. Read about our Fall 2020 undergraduate recipients here.
Congratulations, Nicola, Lisa, and Zoey!