Undergraduate Research & Internship Opportunities

I use plant-insect interactions to study fundamental topics in evolutionary ecology, including plant trade-offs between herbivore avoidance and pollinator attraction, how interspecific interactions among insects shape community diversity, and the evolution of plant defense and mating traits. Students will spend 5-10 hours/week assisting with plant-insect research during the spring 2023 semester, with the potential to continue in summer or future semesters. Duties will include insect care (moths), plant care and greenhouse work, including controlled pollinations and insect mating and feeding assays.

Students will assist with ongoing projects and/or do independent research within the scope of the lab as undergraduate research assistants. Alternatively, students interested in independent research may take BIOL 4050 for research credit with Dr. Jacobsen. Projects may include lab work, fieldwork (particularly in the summer/early fall), and writing scientific literature.

Interested students should submit a cover letter, CV, list of biology courses taken and grades, and contact information for 3 academic/professional references.

Research in the Kellar Lab focuses on discovering genetic and morphological variation in disparate groups of flowering plants. Incorporating both classical and state-of-the-art techniques, my lab addresses questions in plant systematics, species identification, and biodiversity investigations. We are interested in revealing how evolutionary history has led to the diverse range of biodiversity in ecosystems across the planet and in applying phylogeny to taxonomic classifications, ecological studies, and conservation planning.

Students will meet with Dr. Kellar to discuss research interests, read scientific literature to become familiar with the topic, develop an experiment, and write a FUSE grant proposal (with guidance from Dr. Kellar). Projects may include fieldwork outdoors, lab work, computational analyses, and/or work with collections in the herbarium.

The Wong lab is broadly interested in studying the proximate mechanisms underlying variation in animal behaviors. Currently, our efforts are spent investigating the interactions between stress, personality type, and cognition. We are trying to understand the roles the brain, genetics, and hormones play in different stress coping styles/personality types and their impacts on learning/memory. We study these topics using zebrafish. Undergraduates in the lab can help out with ongoing research projects or develop their own independent project (FUSE project). See Wong lab website for more details.

Wong Lab

Dr. Ryan Wong

Genetics (BIOL 2140)

Our lab studies the genetics of pathogenesis and antifungal drug sensitivity in the human pathogenic fungus Candida albicans. C. albicans is a normal component of the human microbiome in most individuals, but can cause disease ranging from superficial infections to lethal systemic infections in their human host. C. albicans causes approximately 23,000 systemic infections in the US per year and mortality due to these infections ranges from 25-40% despite aggressive antifungal therapy. The ability of the fungus to cause systemic disease is tightly linked to its ability to change its morphology, and this is where our focus has centered in recent years. Students can be involved in all aspects of the research, from experimental design, running experiments, data analysis, and all the way to helping write our papers for publication in scientific journals. Our projects involve mutating the organism to study gene function, microscopy, gene expression analysis, phenotypic analysis, and bioinformatics and we are introducing an animal model of infection to our work, the nematode worm C. elegans, which will allow us to move from in vitro observations to in vivo impacts.

Genetics (BIOL 2140)