Last week, undergraduate Alexis Kirkendall concluded her 10-week Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Maine. Over that time, she has been an integral member of the Ishaq lab, and had assisted with lab work for multiple projects, comparing microscopy staining protocols, training students, assisting with laboratory management and safety regulation checks, and more. She picked up skills in animal sample collection, microscopy and staining, parasitology, culture media preparation, DNA extraction, and data visualization in R. Alexis also helped create some of the marketing materials for the Microbes and Social Equity Symposium in July, and facilitated group discussions as a note taker.
At the end of the program, REU students create posters and short presentations of their efforts over the summer. The presentations were last week, but you can check out the poster below.
Alexis is heading back to Ohio for her next year at Heidelberg College where, in addition to studying science, she is leading initiatives to make the campus more accessible and inclusive. But, we hope to see her back in Maine sometime in the future!
The Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) 2022 summer program has begun again, and the Ishaq Lab is pleased to welcome Alexis!
Alexis Kirkendall
Undergraduate Researcher, Biology, Heidelberg University
Alexis is from Ohio and is majoring in Biology at Heidelberg University. Her research interests are in genetics and she has a love for the fascinating world of microbes. She joined the lab through the Summer 2022 REU. She is researching Cryptosporidium in cows, helping in the MSE Symposium, and aiding in the Camel Rumen Microbiome Project this summer.
Across the U.S., REU programs are intended to engage undergraduates in research, including those who have no or very little research experience and no opportunity to do so at their home institution. The program I volunteer for is through the UMaine Initiative for One Health and the Environment, which brings about 10 students to campus for 10 weeks to engage in research and professional development. In addition to participating in research, the students attend workshops of coming up with research plans and questions, professional development plans, their resumes, posters, presentations, and other skills.
Did you know that camels have three stomach chambers or that they have to throw up their own food in order to digest their food properly? Have you felt excluded from science spaces before? Then this blog post is for you!
Allow me to introduce myself.
My name is Myra, and I am a rising senior at SUNY Stony Brook University, where my major is Ecosystems and Human Impact, with a biology minor. In a nutshell, my major is interdisciplinary with a focus on conservation and ecology within human societies.
If I were to describe my college experience in one word I’d pick “surprises”. I never actually saw myself being a scientist in my middle and high school years. I found it hard to care about abstract concepts or theories that felt so far removed from humanity, particularly minority communities. But, during college I found myself falling in love with environmental studies, and along with it, the beautiful complexities that come with being human in our increasingly anthropogenic world.
At UMaine, we focus on the One Health Initiative, which views the health of humans, animals, and the environment as interconnected. When COVID-19 caused everyone to go into lockdown, I was fortunate to find this farm was looking for crew members, with a focus on food security. While certainly not how I planned to spend the summer of 2020, farming for underserved communities is where I saw how impactful One Health was. Organic farmers commonly use plastic mulch as a popular alternative to pesticides for weed suppression. At my home institution, I lead a project on the impacts of microplastics on earthworm health, an Ecotoxicology lab (students of the lab affectionately gave it the nickname “the Worm lab”). We use earthworm health as an indicator of soil health, which in turn is crucial for crop flourishment. The Worm Lab and farming emboldened me to pursue science and, ergo, look for this REU!
At UMaine, I am a member of the Ishaq Lab where I work on the camel metagenome project. Basically, scientists in Egypt raised camels on different diets, then used samples from their feces to sequence their microbial genome. These microbes live in the camel rumen (part of the camel stomach), and help the camel digest their food. What I do with Dr. Ishaq’s lab is, I perform data analysis on these sequences to see how the microbial gene profile changes with different diets. Camels are essential for transportation and food for the communities that rely on them, so finding the most efficient feed for them is important. Camels also release methane depending on their diet so it’s possible humans could control methane production of camels through their diet.
Being a part of the REU ANEW program for 2021 definitely has been an interesting experience, since it is the first time this program has been conducted virtually. Even though I would have loved to have seen everyone in person and spent time in lovely Orono, Maine, I’m glad for the research opportunity as it has further solidified my love of research and the One Health initiative.
Myra’s poster for the REU Research Symposium, virtual, Aug 13, 2021.
