What updates do you have on your research for this summer?

So, this summer’s research isn't going amazingly! We set up a field experiment looking at the interactive effect of parasitism, invasion, and predation. We've completely given up on it. I'm not going to keep banging my head against the wall. For whatever reason, this year the predators have not shown up in any kind of abundant-enough numbers to do anything manipulative with them. But that's okay. This happens a lot when you do field work. There's often something that, due to no fault of your own or lack of knowledge, just doesn't work out. In the next couple of weeks, we're going to be starting up the field work for another project, looking at mosquito response to sound and mating in urban and rural habitats. I'm optimistic that it'll move forward more smoothly.

Have there been any surprisingly positive outcomes?

I'm really enjoying the remote program this year, a lot more than I thought I would. I'm taking time to teach the students more about what happens outside of the data collection.

Usually, students are on the ground, everybody's in “Go!” mode. Learn how to ID mosquitoes, learn the field methods, learn how to do colony maintenance! And this is what they do for eleven weeks straight, right? We typically have regular lab meetings and give them papers to read here and there, but now we're really talking about experimental design and the publication process. The students are helping to put the manuscript together, stuff that we never had time to do. Exploring data! Students are spending time digging more into data. I also really love journal club. I'd like to keep teaching a lot of things from this summer as we move forward. It’s been positive.

How do you see hope fitting into your work?

I am a pessimist by nature. I was born this way. Tyson is where I am not a pessimist. I am hopeful. I think that what we've managed to pull off under these circumstances, gives me a lot of hope for our resiliency in the future moving forward. And I would think that if anything, we've gotten more recognition in the last two years than we had previously. We’ve learned how to make things work and learn some things that we can apply moving forward when we're back in person. Despite some of the scrambling and the freaking out, we're going to come out of this a lot more confident in what we're able to do and to provide for students. The Tyson summer program will end up being a more robust fellowship moving forward.