Profile

• Time Zone

  Eastern

  
  
• Organization

  Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  I study ex situ plant conservation, which is the conservation of plants outside their natural habitat. I use techniques like tissue culture (growing plants and test tubes) and cryopreservation (freezing plant seeds and tissues in liquid nitrogen for long-term storage) to help preserve species for the future. I focus primarily on studying the genetics of these species.

  
  
• Which of the following best describes your career stage?

  Postdoctoral Researcher

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  What is your favorite plant? Why?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 1 here (300 words):

  My favorite plant is the Pawpaw tree (Asimina triloba). It's native to Ohio, where I live, and it produces large, delicious fruits every fall that taste like a cross between a mango and a banana. In fact, it's sometimes called the Indiana banana. We have a festival to celebrate the fruit in Ohio every year. It's also the host species for the zebra swallowtail butterfly. It's the best fruit no one's ever heard of!

  
  
• Profile Question 2

  Can you share a funny/interesting lab or field story?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 2 here (300 words):

  I once did field work in Hawaii, working with an endangered plant that lives on the cliffs near the sea. We went to survey the plant in February, which is peak humpback whale watching season. The humpback whales travel 3,000 miles from Alaska to Hawaii every year to breed and birth their young. In addition to the perfect Hawaii weather, we got to watch whales splash in the ocean while we did our field work. It was my best field location so far!

  
  
• Profile Question 3

  When and why did you decide to go into a science career?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 3 here (300 words):

  I decided to go into science late in my undergraduate degree. I had started my degree in art, but after a few internships, I realized that I didn't actually enjoy the jobs I was getting. So, I would go take hikes in the forest to think about what I actually wanted to do, and one day I realized that I was happiest outside with the plants! So, I changed my major to biology and immediately got an internship to see if I enjoyed doing research. Fortunately, my first internship was at a museum doing genetic work on birds, and I loved it! After that internship, I started working in a plant genetics lab, and I never stopped.

  
  
• Availability

  I am NOT available, please temporarily remove me from the available mentor list

  
  
• Capacity: How many teams at a time are you comfortable working with?

  1

  
  

Recent Posts

Honors Biology Team 3 Megan Philpott Apr 1, 2019

Hi Team, 

How's your project coming along? Do you have any interesting findings?

Honors Biology Team 3 Megan Philpott Mar 21, 2019

Hi Team, 

It sounds like you have a cool project going! A few days ago I asked you to think about whether plant cells like to be hypertonic, isotonic, or hypotonic. The answer is, plant cells like to be hypotonic! While our cells might burst…

more

Hi Team, 

It sounds like you have a cool project going! A few days ago I asked you to think about whether plant cells like to be hypertonic, isotonic, or hypotonic. The answer is, plant cells like to be hypotonic! While our cells might burst in a hypotonic solution, plant cells have a strong cell wall around them that keeps them from bursting. When plant cells are hypotonic, we say that they're "turgid". This is how plants can stay strong and upright in blowing winds, but it also means that plants are very sensitive to changes in water availability, water concentration, and humidity. 

For your celery project, how will you decide how much the color of the celery changed? You could do something like compare your experimental treatments to a control, or you could take pictures of each celery piece before and after your experiment to compare, or you could come up with another idea entirely! Do you know what causes the celery to be green in the first place? 

Good luck!

Honors Biology Team 3 Megan Philpott Mar 18, 2019

Hi Team, 

Did you enjoy your discussion about water and plants?  It sounds like you learned some cool things about how water moves through different types of cells and membranes, and how the concentration of a solution can affect the…

more

Hi Team, 

Did you enjoy your discussion about water and plants?  It sounds like you learned some cool things about how water moves through different types of cells and membranes, and how the concentration of a solution can affect the movement of water. A lot of the same principals of water movement in plants apply to humans too! Have you learned about the cell wall in plants yet? It's very rigid compared to the plasma membrane in plant cells. Do you think plant cells like to be hypertonic, hypotonic, or isotonic?