Keiko Farah

Undergraduate Fellow

“I'm glad that we're still able to do summer research even though everything has been weird. Lots our friends have likely been booted out of their programs and I feel terrible. I've already made some really good friends and I'm just really happy that we still have our own little bubble.”

If you could describe your research to someone who you met casually on the street, what would you tell them that you do?

“I would tell them that I study the ecology and diseases of common plants. We study what environmental factors might affect their growth, their life span and their habitats.”

What's your favorite part about the research that you do on the Plant Disease team?

“My favorite part is the field work, when we go out and take surveys of the Plantago lanceolata weeds, which are basically everywhere in St. Louis. You walk down the sidewalk, look at plants, and just chill out. You're not really doing a whole lot, but you're being really observant. I think it’s really important, and a good distraction.”

How is working in a similar place every day, different from your usual experience doing research?

“The only other experience I have is when I did a couple of weeks at the medical school in the spring semester before all this shit happened. That was obviously a lot different. You go into a lab, you strip, put on a lab coat and you are sitting at a station doing your work. There aren’t really any distractions, but now there are 1,000,001 distractions. I’m not really good at managing my time and I don’t know...I feel like I can’t really learn without having a set location. It’s difficult, for sure.”

Where does your interest in nature stem from?

“From growing up in Maine, definitely. I grew up in a pretty small college town, but you have Acadia National Park right there. You’re on the coast. A lot of field trips and things are out to fish hatcheries, going on hikes, going cross-country skiing, things like that. I think if I hadn't been as exposed to nature from a very young age, I would have gotten there, just not as fast.”

What do you feel about research that's done solely to protect nature and not necessarily for the advancement of science?

“It’s really important. There are a lot of brave and innovative people on the front lines who are working to create technology that we can use to make our field research more accurate and dependable. Research going into appreciating and knowing more about nature that is around us is crucial! We need to understand the world that we live in. It’s more than a hobby. It’s part of life.”

Keiko worked with Rachel Penczykowski’s Plant Disease team during summer 2020. Learn more about their host-pathogen coevolution research here.