Two Life Sciences Graduate Students Receive Prestigious Research Awards
Doctoral students Ms. Tereza Jezkova and Mr. Daniel Curtis received highly competitive awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, respectively, to support their dissertation research.
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Tereza Jezkova |
Ms. Jezkova, a student in the laboratory of Dr. Brett Riddle’s, was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for her project “Integrating Comparative Phylogeography With Ecological Modeling to Investigate Late Quaternary Biogeography in Four Species of Kangaroo Rats (genus Dipodomys).” She was awarded $11,500 for two years.
In her research, Ms. Jezkova relies on reconstructions of climatic conditions of the last glacial maximum (approximately 18,000 years before present) to infer the ecological niches of four species of kangaroo rats during this cold period. She then formulates species-specific hypotheses about changes in range sizes, range shifting, and degree of range fragmentation, and tests these hypotheses using genetic markers. She applies this methodology to four species of kangaroo rats that co-occur in the Great Basin Desert of North America, and evaluates whether these rodents experienced congruent or independent responses to historical climatic changes.
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Daniel L. Curtis |
Mr. Daniel L. Curtis, a student in the laboratory of Dr. Iain McGaw’s, received a Postgraduate Scholarship to study the physiology of estuarine crabs in northwestern North America. He was awarded $63,000 for three years.
The goal of Mr. Curtis’ project is to determine how crabs living in estuaries balance the physiological stress caused by exposure to low salinity with the physiological demands associated with feeding and digestion. He examines the effects of salinity exposure on mechanical digestion and on extracellular and subsequent intracellular digestion in a weak (Dungeness Crab, Cancer magister) and an efficient (Blue Crab, Callinectes sapidus) osmoregulator. This project takes an integrative approach to investigate the prioritization of physiological processes following feeding, and will provide information on how changes in salinity conditions due to anthropogenic effects or global warming can affect the energetic demands of animals.