Lab Exchange

The road to investigating an ancestral mammal, Tenrec ecaudatus, as a model for mammalian heart regeneration

I am currently a 2^nd year integrative physiology PhD student in Dr. Frank van Breukelen’s laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The core focus of my dissertation is to investigate the physiology of Tenrec ecaudatus through functional imaging.

Tenrecs are bizarre basoendothermic Afrotherian mammals. They are endemic to Madagascar and its surrounding islands where ambient temperatures often fluctuate >30°C and <20°C. Interestingly, they… Read more

“I believe, as you know… in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Furthermore I have plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my investigations. I wish it were not the case, since, sadly, I am allergic to both the sun and rum punches, but then we all have our crosses… Read more

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Simon Lailvaux’s lab at the University of New Orleans. My research focuses on how varying energetic environments affect aspects of green anole (Anolis carolinensis) phenotypes and ultimately their offspring. To tackle my research questions, I used methods such as measuring gene expression of hormones involved in the response to varying environmental pressures. I wanted to expand my ability to identify and measure mechanisms that link the genotype to the phenotype. The Research… Read more

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Michael Romero’s lab at Tufts University studying the broad effects of long-term chronic stress on the physiology of house sparrows. I noticed that the majority of chronic stress studies involved subjecting animals to one or two bouts of stress. While these studies are useful, they are not very ecologically relevant to what animals actually experience in the wild, which would likely involve more bouts of stress in their lifetime. In 2021, I… Read more

I am an NSF postdoctoral scholar in the van Breukelen laboratory at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I am a comparative physiologist fundamentally interested in the evolution of endothermy. There are numerous robust hypotheses or models to explain the evolution of endothermy/homeothermy in mammals. 1) The Body-Size Reduction Hypothesis predicts that as therapsids (mammalian ancestors) decreased in size, there was a required increase in metabolism. Earlier therapsids were generally large, typically 20-100 kg. As a result, these animals… Read more

I work for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game as a wildlife biologist in Fairbanks, Alaska. My focus is physiological research on Fish and Game managed wildlife species, and I investigate questions that can be used to inform management biologists. I have been involved in projects that extract steroid hormones from keratin tissues since reading about the extraction of cortisol from grizzly bear hair by Brian Macbeth and coauthors in 2010. This led to work with harbor seal… Read more