Christopher Tomera

Undergraduate Lennette Fellow

“I live not too far from a forest preserve, and there's hiking trails through the woods along a river. It's been nice to be able to go out and clear my head.

I've always been outdoors, looking at animals, bugs, plants, whatever—always interested. But I wasn't always certain that that was what I wanted to do for my career.

I'll be a senior in the fall. For the first few years, I was on the premed track. I still liked all the environmental stuff that I would look up on the side. But at the beginning of last summer, I had an opportunity to go do some field research with bald eagles in Michigan, and after talking with some of the climbers and researchers and the PI for that project, I thought, ‘I could definitely see myself doing something like this.’

And so I was thinking about that the whole summer. The rest of the summer I worked at a pulmonary lab, which was cool too. I was really debating it a lot. And then all throughout the fall semester, I was slowly moving more towards wildlife and ecology. Sometime over the winter, I decided that was what I definitely wanted to do.

I've started to see research in a new way. Before, wildlife and ecology was just an interest and a curiosity. Now I've taken curiosity and turned that into my work, using it to set up a research question. With this summer in particular, it's a little harder to do that on my own—it’s a lot of helping with projects that are already going on. But it's definitely setting the stage for the research I might want to do back at school or after college.”

Christopher worked with Solny Adalsteinsson's Tick & Wildlife Ecology team during summer 2020. Learn more about their prescribed fire and tick-borne disease ecology research here.