Tag: undergraduate research

A close-up picture of petri dishes containing a light yellow film of microbes.

Rebecca received an undergraduate research award!

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Rebecca French, an undergraduate researcher in Animal and Veterinary Science, is beginning her time in the Ishaq Lab with an auspicious start: she has been awarded a 2021 research award from the J. Franklin Witter Undergraduate Research Endowment Fund! The fund supports AVS undergraduate student involvement in faculty supervised research which involves the J. Franklin Witter Teaching & Research Center.

Rebecca’s project will involve zoonotic disease tracking in rodent populations that live near farms/human development versus those which live in more natural areas, and will take place at the Witter farm and a paired natural ecosystem. Her project is part of a larger collaboration between myself and a team of researchers, which was recently funded by the University of Maine, but which has not yet been announced (details soon).

Rebecca formally joined my research lab in February of this year, but I have had the pleasure of teaching her in my data analysis class since January, which will be a handy skillset later in the project. She also learn and perform microbial culturing, qPCR, Sanger sequencing, and even some animal trapping, handling, and identification; mammal physiology data collection and analysis.

Rebecca French

Undergraduate Researcher, Animal and Veterinary Sciences

Rebecca is an animal and veterinary science student with a concentration in pre-veterinary medicine. She joined the Ishaq lab team in 2021 as a part of her capstone project, which is focused on flying squirrels and mice that are carrying zoonotic pathogens into Maine.

Emily awarded an undergraduate research fellowship!

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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).

Portrait of Emily Pierce

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!

A very close-up image of a small, dark brown mouse perched on the arm of a graduate researcher wearing a surgical gown.

The first mouse study involving the Ishaq Lab begins!

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Mice have arrived for a collaborative project on diet, gut microbes, and health in conjunction with researchers at Husson University! This is the first mouse project for the Ishaq Lab, and also my first hands-on mouse project (in my previous publications with mice, I received datasets but the mouse work was performed solely by my collaborators).

A person holding a mouse in a research facility. The person is wearing a hairnet, nitrile gloves, a surgical mask, and a surgical gown. The mouse with dark brown fur is sitting on the top of the person's hand. In the background, there are metal shelves with bins and containers of research supplies.
Person in a research facility holding up their arm with a mouse on it. Person is wearing a hairnet, nitrile gloves, surgical mask, and a surgical gown. They are holding their left arm up to the camera to show off a mouse with dark brown fur sitting on their arm. In the background is a metal shelf with containers of research materials.

This is one of my first new collaborations at the University of Maine, which began in September 2019 as I was just finding my way around campus. An established researcher at Husson University, Dr. Yanyan Li, reached out to welcome me and talk about overlap between our work. Yanyan, her husband Dr. Tao Zhang, also a researcher at Husson University, and collaborator Dr. Grace Chen at Michigan State University, had been working on beneficial compounds found in broccoli using mice as an experimental model for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Over the past year, in consultation with IBD experts Drs. Gary Mawe and Peter Moses (who I worked with previously while at UVM!), we have written several proposals for funding to expand the project.

Johanna Holman worked for several years with Yanyan and Tao, as an undergraduate researcher and then as a research assistant. She joined the Ishaq Lab this fall to continue her work as a graduate student and add gut microbiology to her skill repertoire. This experiment will form the base of her graduate thesis, and Johanna is taking a lead role in managing the project as well as several undergraduate researchers, including Dorien Baudewyns, assisting with the mice and lab work. As an early career researcher, and new to mice, I’m extremely lucky to be able to learn from an experienced team of researchers!

Reblog: “Animal and veterinary sciences seniors: Capstone stories”

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Animal and veterinary sciences seniors: Capstone stories

Starting this fall, I have been teaching the UMaine Capstone Experience courses for Animal and Veterinary Sciences students (AVS 401 and 402). To complete the University of Maine requirements for graduation, students must participate in a Capstone Experience to knit together the work of their undergraduate degree into a cohesive project. AVS students are required to part pate in research under researcher mentorship. Some of those students felt comfortable sharing short descriptions of their project. The slightly edited summaries and my intro were posted to the University of Maine news page for teaching experience updates.

All 3 UMaine undergrads in the Ishaq Lab made Dean’s List Spring 2020 !

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Congratulations to all three University of Maine undergrads in the Ishaq Lab for making the Dean’s List in Spring 2020: Jade Chin (AVS), Nicholas Hershbine (EES), and Emily Pierce (AVS)!!

Note, the Bowdoin Dean’s List is announced annually in the fall.

2019 review one of Indoor Air’s top downloaded articles for 2018 – 2019!

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A collaborative review article that I was last author on was listed in the top 10% most downloaded papers of 208/2019 in the journal Indoor Air! Even more impressive, this review was published August 20, 2019, and it was still in the top 10% spanning from January 2019 – December 2019!!

This paper stems from my work on the microbiology of the built environment at BioBE, and reviews the interaction between chemistry, microbiology, and health in the built environment. It was co-authored and led by undergraduate students I was mentoring at the time, as well as research associates and PIs from the BioBE lab, and a variety of fabulous collaborators!

From one species to another: A review on the interaction between chemistry and microbiology in relation to cleaning in the built environment

Application open for the Microbial Friends & Foes Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Program at Cornell.

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Poster describing The Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease (CIHMID) program for Microbial Friends and Foes Summer Program.

“The Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease (CIHMID) is accepting applications for the NSF-funded Microbial Friends & Foes Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Program (bit.ly/REU-CIHMID).  Applications are due February 1, 2020.

The Microbial Friends & Foes Program will take place from June 8 to August 14, 2020.  The program will provide training in the concepts and experimental approaches central to understanding microbial interactions with eukaryotic hosts.  Students will learn about broad diversity of microbe-eukaryote interactions through conducting independent research projects, participation in weekly research group meetings, seminars presented by CIHMID faculty, Microbial Friends & Foes Synthesis Panels, CIHMID Summer Symposium, and Microbial Friends & Foes Poster Session. Emphasis will be placed on appreciation of the scientific method and developing effective strategies for conducting research as well as on the synthesis of concepts important to interspecific interactions across diverse systems.  In addition, workshops in electronic database literacy, science citation software, research ethics, science communication, and planning for graduate study will be offered to the Microbial Friends & Foes program participants. Students will receive a stipend of $6000, travel subsidy, meal allowance and on-campus housing.  Applicants will be asked to identify 3 laboratories of interest, and will be selected in a two-step review process by the program organizers and potential mentors. A flyer describing the program is attached and more information can be found at bit.ly/REU-CIHMID.

WHO SHOULD APPLY

*All undergraduate students interested in understanding microbial interactions with eukaryotic hosts.

*Members of minorities underrepresented in science, undergraduates from small colleges, and first-generation college students.

*Applicants must be United Stated citizens or permanent residents and at least 18 years old.”