My experience in Bio 500 will help me as I continue on to graduate school in the fall, where I will be designing and executing more of my own research.
My name is Shayna Rosenbloom and I am a senior majoring in Environmental Biology. For the last year and a half, I have been lucky to work with Dr. Swanne Gordon as part of her eco/evo lab with Dr. Andrés López-Sepulcre. Dr. Gordon studies evolution and maintenance of color polymorphisms and sexual selection in the Wood Tiger Moth and the rapidly evolving Trinidadian Guppy. I have been working with the Guppy system for my research, looking at how foraging behaviors of juveniles Guppies are impacted by predation, imprinting, and life histories. I designed my research to work with a larger project going on in the lab that is being run by Dr. Yusan Yang, a post-doc in the lab.
Like many people, my research was thrown off course due to the pandemic. I was originally going to spend the second half of the spring 2020 semester and the following summer conducting research on the effects of excess testosterone on guppies and their offspring, but that had to be put on pause. As it became evident that the pandemic would keep everything shut down longer than originally anticipated, I redesigned and reworked my project to work even with the ongoing pandemic. Ultimately, I am excited about the experiment I designed and how it connects to a larger lab project.
