Profile

• Time Zone

  Eastern

  
  
• Gender

  Female

  
  
• Organization

  Yale University

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  I earned a B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology from the Ohio State University in 2014. This fall 2016 I started a PhD program in Forest and Environmental Science at Yale University. I have worked at field sites in Panama (2013), Flagstaff (2014), Gabon (2015), and China (2016), and have worked with Neotropical dataset from the Amazon basin and Brazillian cerrado region.
  
  My research interests lie in tropical forests, community ecology, plant-animal interactions, and functional traits. In the past I have studied the reproductive success strategies of individual species, investigated leaf trait patterns across environmental gradients, and explored the effect of hunting and poaching on animal and plant communities. For my doctoral studies, I intend to focus on the interplay between plant traits, environmental variables, and animal dispersal networks to better understand how these interactions work. The forest community is an interconnected web of plant and animal species. In our current environment, these communities are being subjected to a wide variety of changes, from climate change to hunting pressures. Ultimately, I hope that understanding the functional processes of communities will allow us, as a scientific community, to better predict changes in tropical ecosystems due to human impact. Hopefully this information will then be desseminated to non-scientists, giving the public the tools they need to figure out how to minimize impact at a local scale through community outreach and at a broader scale through policy-making.  
  
  While living and working for a year in Gabon, I learned a great deal about the relationship between local communities and their forests and wildlife. This impacted my view of scientific research, conservation, and outreach work immensely. I am eager to continue working with local communities in the forests of central Africa and keen to work on further integrating science and conservation policy.   

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  Can you describe your attitude toward science when you were in high school?

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

  My attitude towards science in high school was, admittedly, lukewarm. If you would have told me that I’d be getting my PhD in Ecology after I graduated college, the teenage version of me would have been very surprised! The thing is, I was always interested in plants and the outdoors, but I never felt that I was smart enough to be a scientist. My high school was very competitive, and although I got good enough grades and enjoyed the classes, I never felt like I could fit in with the other kids in my science and math classes who were at the top of the class. This lead me to start a degree in biomedical drawing as a freshman in college. I loved drawing, and I loved plants, so it seemed perfect at the time. Unfortunately, this program of study involved a lot of drawing on the computer, and this simply wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d thought about what I wanted as a job. I wanted to get outside and spend time learning about plants in real life. Switching majors to ecology allowed me to do just that that! Now I get to spend lots of time outside, traveling around the world to study all different types of plants. I also got to learn a lot of cool facts about plants - why they look so different, about all of the many species, and why certain plants grow in certain areas. I think it’s the best job for me!

  
  
• Profile Question 2

  What is a typical day like for you?

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

  Typical days vary widely for me, which is one of the reasons I love being a scientist so much! There are three main types of days that happen for me though: field days, lab days, and office days. Field days are the most exciting and the most exhausting. I’ve worked with measuring pine trees in Arizona, collecting seeds from nutmeg trees in Panama, and stealthily watched elephants to see which trees’ leaves they eat in Africa. Usually field days involve waking up very early, hiking through the forest to get to where I need to go, and spending the whole day to set up an experiment, observe, or write down data. Sometimes, if a field site is very far away, I’ll even get to go on a camping trip and stay at my field site while I collect data. After field days come lab days. If I’ve been collecting samples, I will need to process them in the lab. This can mean anything from measuring leaves to weighing seeds to dissecting fruits, or even planting seeds that I’ve collected for an experiment. After the field work and lab work is done, I need to spend some time in the office so that I can organize all of the information that I’ve written down, and write a report of what I’ve done so that I can keep track of the scientific methods I’ve used and explain any interesting information I’ve found out from my observations and experiments.

  
  
• Profile Question 3

  What is your favorite plant? Why?

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

  My favorite plant is Virola surinamensis. This is a species of wild nutmeg that grows in tropical forests in Central and South American. There are many reasons why it’s my favorite plant. Virola is the tree I studied in my first, independent experiment. It is the first tree I learned to identify in the tropics, which is now my favorite place to work. It’s a very beautiful, impressive tree that sticks up out of the top of the canopy in tropical forests, and it has thick, curving buttress roots that stabilize the tree in the ground. The flowers of the tree are tiny and white, and the fruits are a little smaller than a ping-pong ball. The outside of the fruit is a yellow capsule, with a bright-red covering over a dark brown, shiny seed. The fruits are very easy to spot in the forest! The bright red seed-cover has a lot of nutrients in it that are good for birds and monkeys, so the trees attract all sorts of animals that turn up to eat the seeds. Finally, even if you can’t see the tree top or seeds on the ground, Virola is easy to identify because it has bright red sap under its bark - if you poke the tree on it’s trunk with a knife or cut it with a machete, it will ooze red. I think that Virola is such a beautiful, expressive, and unique species, which is why it’s my favorite tree!

  
  
• Help represent the outreach efforts of your societies. Please click all those organizations you are a member of:

  (not set)

  
  
• 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?

  2

  
  

Recent Posts

Queen Beans Megan Kathleen Sullivan May 4, 2017

Great job, Queen Beans! Your figures are very clear, and you have labeled the axes and provided an excellent legend so that I can read and understand the graph very easily.

I enjoyed working with you on this project and I'm glad you had…

more

Great job, Queen Beans! Your figures are very clear, and you have labeled the axes and provided an excellent legend so that I can read and understand the graph very easily.

I enjoyed working with you on this project and I'm glad you had fun! 

-Megan

Queen Beans Megan Kathleen Sullivan May 1, 2017

Hope you guys have had fun with this project! As I understand it, you are wrapping up data collection this week. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing any of the final results that you all come up with.

 

-Megan

Queen Beans Megan Kathleen Sullivan May 1, 2017

Hope you guys have had fun with this project! As I understand it, you are wrapping up data collection this week. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing any of the final results that you all come up with.

 

-Megan