Emma Uder

any pronouns
Undergraduate Fellow
Mosquito Team

How did you get here? What brought you to Tyson?

I’m just in love with the community. I got lucky, because I initially had been in school to do humanities, but then I applied to an Earth’s Classroom program because I was bored and thought it would be fun, and I got in. Bill and Jody from Earth’s Classroom convinced me to quit my customer service job and apply for SIFT a couple years ago. I got in, and then I ended up doing a lot of field work here that summer for a Plant Disease Team project. And I was like, wow, Tyson’s pretty and cool and I want to be able to do some more of this field work. So I joined TERA, and now I’m back as an undergrad. They can’t get rid of me.

How might this summer inform your future work?

I don’t love creating experimental designs. I don’t have a ton of fun with that. So this summer, I’m creating a catalog of Tyson mosquitoes. I’m just going around, hunting mosquitoes, I’m identifying them and I’m gonna pin ‘em and photograph ‘em and preserve ‘em, this and that. I think that’s closer to what I want to do someday. I don’t know if I ever want to fully go into academia and research. I’d like to do more conservation based research, which would include stuff like this.

What might other teams not realize about what your team is doing?

I feel like people don’t realize the diversity of mosquitoes here at Tyson. Earlier today, I was putting a mosquito in the freezer, and some people saw it and were like, oh my god, that’s a huge mosquito – what the heck? Like, oh my god, ew. And I was like, well, this is a Toxorhynchites, it’s not gonna bite you, and it’s my favorite mosquito. That’s part of why I’m doing the catalog – so people can see how diverse and beautiful the mosquitoes at Tyson are.

Anything else?

When it comes to how I got to Tyson, I want to say that my family did try to get me interested in the sciences from a young age. Especially my grandparents. My grandpa took me Bigfoot hunting, and my grandma and grandpa always made sure I was outside. And part of the reason I applied for the Earth’s Classroom program was because I’d spent so much time outside as a kid. So, without their influence, I would probably not have ended up on that path. I just wanted to include that, cuz, they’re cool.