Leela Johnson is a senior General Biology major, minoring in Spanish, who joined the Entomology Department in the Fall of 2020. Since then, she has developed an Honors project focused on identifying local dragonfly nymph diets using innovative non-invasive PCR fecal analysis to better understand their ecological value. She plans to finish the data processing and analysis this winter, to prepare and defend her thesis Spring of 2022. In addition to her work with dragonflies, Johnson joined the Honey Bee lab in the Fall of 2021 as one of the undergraduate lab technicians, and has enjoyed the plethora of tasks that support those research conservation efforts. She hopes to pursue graduate school and continue to contribute to research related to conservation of biodiversity through interdisciplinary approaches.
Johnson is grateful for the invaluable people she has met and experiences she has gained through the department, particularly to her charismatic and ever-energetic mentor Dr. Bill Lamp, as well as to the wise-beyond-her-years Master’s student Maggie Hartman. Linette Kingston is a Health Sciences & Analytics major with a minor in International Development & Conflict Management. She first started in the Fritz lab working as a research assistant under PhD candidate Arielle Arsenault-Benoit to assess the species distribution of Culex mosquitoes on a rural-urban gradient in the Washington DC metro area and its implications on West Nile virus epidemiology. Starting in Spring 2021, she started working on an independent thesis through the Entomology Honors Program studying host-seeking behaviors of Culex pipiens f. molestus during various stages of egg development. In the future, she plans to further explore infectious disease vectors and epidemiology and earn a Master of Science in Public Health Comments are closed.
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