Samantha Lyerla

she/her
Undergraduate Fellow
Plant Disease Team

Samantha, a biology major at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, is back in her hometown for the summer. She’s been working on Rachel Penczykowski’s Plant Disease Team this season, her first experience with field work. While Samantha’s academic interests tend towards marine ecosystems, she has appreciated being in the field with her team this summer.

The team is just a great fit. Everybody seems to work so well with each other. Since it's been a lot of tedious stuff and a lot of data entry, we have been starting to go on walks and explore Tyson a little bit because we don't really get out in Tyson. We'll go to the research garden, and we have a couple survey sites right in front, just past the LLC [Living Learning Center]. But we don't really get to go farther out in our own work, so I like when we do go out and about.

I ask for her favorite spots, and she gestures up the main road.

Today we walked over that way and we ended up by the wolf sanctuary [Endangered Wolf Center]. We talked to somebody and she was like, this was a tour only spot, so we had to leave. But we got to see some of the wolves.

I feel like a lot of it has just been the individual team stuff, just little things. Like the other day it took our whole team to fight this spider in the lab because we were all scared of it. And it was like a brown recluse spider, so it wasn't a good one. I don't know, it's just little fun things. I mean, fighting a spider, not really fun, but, you know, team building, I guess.