At New College of Florida, students have fantastic opportunities to work closely with faculty on significant research projects. These can range from manatee biology to shark ecology, to red tide to climate change, and looking at coral reefs. These opportunities and the close relationship they form with their faculty members are unlike any at any other institution.
I was really attracted to New College because of the hands-on research opportunities and the way that undergraduates could be involved in research before even getting a bachelor's degree. And, as well, by the high rate of graduating New College students who could get a Ph.D., which is one of the highest in the country, I believe. And as a student who plans to go and get a Ph.D. in Marine Biology after I graduated, that was definitely a big driving factor for me.
Something I really love about New College is that I can work directly with students on my research and my lab is I don't have any graduate students or post-docs, I just have undergraduate students. And the students here are really great, engaged members of my lab. Recently, I have built on-ramps into my lab from my courses to allow for a diverse group of students to be able to participate in research. And so I redesigned my Neurobiology Lab, which any student could sign up for, as a course-based research experience. And so in this lab, we work together on research that relates to my own research, students read the literature related to research, they learn the different neurophysiology techniques to be able to do the research. And then about halfway through the semester, they actually propose ideas for research questions and hypotheses that they can then test together.
So right now, four of us at the New College of Florida are working with Dr. Athena Rycy as her research assistants. Right now, we are studying African manatee vocalizations, which have never been studied before. Actually, that's really cool. Apart from an unconfirmed recording from the 80s, they had never been heard or even recorded. So that's really exciting to be some of the first people to take a look at that.
We're going to be looking at some different behaviors and frogs, and the where I'm coming in as I'm helping do statistical computing with a program called "Our Studio," and more specifically a package called the "EC2," which helps us see and calculate differential expression in genes, which then helps us look at like how different muscle fiber types arise and how that then produces different behavior.
I have been offered an opportunity to do my thesis alongside Dr. Gardner working with the bull sharks in Manatee River and hoping to learn about the noise pollution from a current construction project on the bridge of Manatee River and see how it affects the wildlife in the area using acoustic receivers and acoustic telemetry, which is basically just listening for little tags that we put in animals that makes out and tracking their movements.