The very first Ishaq Lab undergraduate researcher, Emily Pierce, has also been awarded the first fellowship of the Ishaq Lab!
Emily has been awarded a Faculty Fellows Research Assistantship for spring 2021 from the University of Maine Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR)! The $1200 award will provide funds for salary to Emily and research materials, and will support her project for her AVS Capstone Experience (selected Capstone project summaries are here, but Emily’s is not included).
Emily joined the lab in early 2020 to work on a project investigating calf health and gut microbes, but very soon after joining the lab, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic emerged and changed the way we were able to interact on campus. Without missing a beat, Emily shifted her efforts from helping me wrangle the lab renovations and sorting out our inventory, to helping me improve my teaching materials, to diving deep into previous literature to dig up protocols for her experiment in 2021: “Ideal Conditions for Cryptosporidium Attachment and Infection.“
We’ll be performing the experiment itself over the winter break, and then using the spring to analyze the data and write them up. As part of the CUGR award, Emily will be presenting her work at the 2021 Student Symposium in April, which will be held virtually this year. You’ll have to wait till then to get more details!