Charlie Rosser

Undergraduate Fellow, Team Skeet

“I don’t want to call them smart… they’re not smart. But I do feel sometimes they’re purposefully trying to make my job harder.”

Charlie Rosser is known for her witty humor and keen observations of mosquito behavior. She has spent her summer collecting and identifying thousands of mosquito larva. The collection process is where the bulk of fun lies.

“It’s not intuitive to know how to move a mosquito from here to there and then capture it in a little cup. I work mostly with Tom [Radomski] and Kathleen [Dobbs] – we call ourselves ‘Team Thermo.’ We’re looking at how heat is impacting mosquito behavior and breeding. We have to have at least two people every time we collect a mosquito because someone has to suck up the mosquito [with a manual aspirator – a science straw] and then someone has to be able to close the lid really fast without injuring the mosquito in the process, which is hard.”

Any anecdotes of a stray mosquito you’d like to share?

“Mosquitos are unpredictable. We’ve had quite a few escapes in the lab. I watched an escape where Kathleen jumped up so fast and managed to suck it back up into the straw! I have no idea how she does that. It’s really fun working in the lab doing these controlled experiments.”