Quinn Fox

Graduate Student

“I like hands-on work and being outside. I like how everyday is a little bit different. I'm enjoying it a lot.”

“Right now I'm collecting data. I get to go around to different parks and take photographs that will be analyzed later. It's been nice to get outside and hit the ground running.”

What parks are you visiting?

“Some West Tyson and Tyson sites and then parks around an urban to rural gradient in St Louis. So, Lafayette Park, we went to Flynn, Kirkwood, Tower Grove—a bunch of parks like that. I'm taking pictures along a transect. I have this little quadrat thing [a frame]; I lay it on the ground and take a picture of what’s in it and flip it to a new area. And, we're looking for plant species—Plantago species—both uninfected and infected with powdery mildew and those will be further analyzed. Right now it's just the basic data collection using photographs of these plants along different transects in parks.”

What about the urban-to-rural gradient do you think is important?

“My undergraduate research was more focused on nature unaffected by humans. But I don't think that's a very realistic view seeing that humans affect nature so much, and since we have growing urban sites I think it's really important to see ecology through an urban lens—a human influenced lens. I think that's really interesting. And also a really important thing to be doing.”

Quinn is a member of Rachel Penczykowski’s Plant Disease team and a PhD candidate in the Evolution, Ecology and Population Biology graduate program at Washington University.