Grace Beery

Major and Minor: Biology, Ecology & Conservation

Area of Research: Marine Science

Name of Mentor: Randi Rotjan

How did you get involved in research?

My sophomore year, I knew I wanted to pursue research in coral conservation and climate change, and I spent a lot of time researching professors with similar academic interests. I ended up cold-emailing faculty members who I thought would be a good fit for me based on their previous research, asking if I could volunteer in their labs. One professor said yes, so I started gaining experience by cleaning fish tanks in their lab.

How did you meet your mentor?

I had taken Randi’s Marine Biology class my freshman year and I knew I wanted to work in her lab, but she didn’t have any opportunities open for undergraduate volunteers when I first reached out to her. We got to know each other better during fall of my junior year when I was taking her small, field-based class Marine Urban Ecology, and I ended up joining her lab as a volunteer that semester.

What has your UROP experience taught you?

The most important thing that I learned from my UROP experience is that you will fail many, many times. Equipment will break, corals will die, and experiments will fail. But, that’s a major part of research, and it is definitely true that you can learn more from your failures than your successes. All of my failures taught me how to quickly adapt and think outside of the box to solve problems, and ultimately made my experimental design stronger and my results more meaningful once I was able to overcome my many challenges and setbacks.

How has this experience helped you with non-research related things at BU?

My experience with my UROP research empowered me with confidence and the tools to know that I can overcome any obstacle, academic or otherwise, that comes my way. The knowledge that I gained on climate change and urban water pollution throughout my research helped me secure an internship with my dream job and allowed me to become a greater advocate for environmental justice and climate activism in my community.

What does a day in your research life look like?

One of my favorite things about my research is that every day is completely different. Some days, I will be at our field site all day in Jamestown, Rhode Island, helping our SCUBA dive team haul corals out of the water and clean each coral with toothbrushes before bringing them back to BU. Other days, I’ll be monitoring a 24-hour experiment in the lab and will bring a sleeping bag into my office so I can get up every couple of hours to collect data. Most days I would spend between 6-10 hours in the lab feeding corals, changing their water, planning and delegating tasks for future days, running experiments, and collecting data.

What advice would you give to someone interested in UROP? Describe your UROP experience in 1-3 sentences.

Reach out to professors you’re interested in collaborating with early. Expect to work as a volunteer for a few semesters or as a research for credit student before being offered a UROP position. You don’t need to know exactly what you want your research to be on, but you should have a broad idea of what topics you’re interested in, and if you want to do more lab-based or computational research, etc. Communicate with your PI and graduate student mentors early and often, and be in charge of your own deadlines.

During the summer of 2022, I conducted an experiment to determine the effects of climate change and urban water pollution on New England’s only coral species, Astrangia poculata. This research will help predict the resiliency of A. poculata under the increasing threat of global change.