delilah Sayer
UnderGraduate Fellow
How do you explain your research to your friends and family?
“My family is always asking me questions about ticks and diseases. Whenever I mention that I study mosquitoes they go straight to the hot button issues like Zika virus. I always have to bring it back down. We’re just looking for natural ways to bring down mosquito populations. Also, we’re working with parasites that don’t affect humans, only invertebrates.”
Fortunately, Delilah surrounds herself by like-minded mosquito enthusiasts here at Tyson to share her passions with. But these ‘passions’ for mosquitoes aren’t as alien as they seem. Rising through the SIFT and TERA programs, Delilah has slowly nurtured a love for ecological research.
“I wasn’t really sure what I was getting myself into. I just knew that I wanted to work with living things and I found that I loved the mix of being in the lab and the field. There’s this really big sense of accomplishment that you can get from research. Even if what you’re doing is small, it still moves towards this bigger goal that’s always there in my mind.”
That bigger goal is in Delilah’s mind through all the mosquito bites and mundane lab days. Along with the right podcasts, this makes those low points pale in comparison to the high points of her time here at Tyson.
“Prior coming to Tyson I never really had a job-job. So I’m lucky that this is my first real one. It’s a very familial community. I know that people are going to listen to what I have to say. That’s really cool. You can’t get that at most jobs.”