Nicoletta Memos
Hometown: Syosset, New York
Age: 20
Major: Animal Behavior
What are your plans post-Southwestern?
My plans post-Southwestern vary. I would love to go to graduate school to either pursue Primate Behavior or Physical Anthropology. In addition, I plan to get more lab experience and continue my research that I have started at Southwestern University with my mentor/advisor. If the opportunity presents itself, I hope to travel around the world (mainly to Africa, Indonesia and the Galapagos Islands) to research different animals and conduct naturalistic observations to investigate how different species live in their natural environment.
When do you feel most like a scientist?
I feel most like a scientist when I am actually in the lab with my lab coat on recording data from the paced mating behavior tests used to observe sexual behavior in the rat model. It really is fascinating, and having to focus on timings of different behaviors of the rats really makes me feel like an established scientist!
For my capstone….
… I am currently working on investigates the influence of an endocannabinoid agonist and antagonist on female sexual behavior of Long-Evans rats. Female rats were injected with either an endocannabinoid antagonist or saline vehicle 20 minutes prior to partner preference tests (the experimental female rat is in a middle chamber and can either access a stimulus female rat in an adjacent chamber or a stimulus male rat in an opposite adjacent chamber). Three weeks later, the female rats were then injected with either the endocannabinoid agonist or the saline vehicle 20 minutes prior to partner preference tests identical to the tests described above.
Kalyn Chacon
Hometown: El Paso, TX
Age: 21
Major: Animal Behavior
What are your plans post-Southwestern?
Immediately after graduation I am planning a trip across South America for six months, after which I am planning on doing a year-long apprenticeship at Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation in Kendalia, Texas. There I will gain experience caring for and rehabilitating every kind of animal imaginable. After that I would like to go to graduate school to get my PhD in Animal Behavior/Animal Welfare and probably get a certification for Non-Profit Management so that someday I can open my own Wildlife Refuge. My long-term goals are to continue doing observational research while working for wildlife and environmental conservation.
When do you feel most like a scientist?
I don’t feel very much like a scientist while I’m actually collecting data in the field or conducting an experiment in the lab. I feel most like a scientist during the later stages—when I’m statistically analyzing the data I’ve collected or when I’m sitting with 50 articles written by other scientists surrounding me, [working] through the foundations built by others to find questions and answers that help point my personal findings in the right direction. To me science is such a huge group effort. It is innumerable years of hard work put in by people all over the world, all combined into one huge knowledge-base from which we can find connections and patterns that can tell us more than we ever imagined about the world we live in. If I can add my own small piece of new knowledge to that framework… that would be incredible.
My Collaborative Research Projects
Faculty adviser: Jesse Purdy
Current research question: Can animals retain learned information through metamorphosis? Specifically, are Xenopus laevis frogs affected by information they learned as tadpoles?
Research and the scientific method: There are three extremely important parts of the scientific method that aren’t mentioned when we all learned about it in elementary school: Patience, Flexibility, and a Positive Attitude. I’ve done field research here at Southwestern for two summers and lab research for the last two semesters, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that in science anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Research takes a lot of time and work… So the only way you’re going to get through to the end (and have the beautiful final reward of real results) is to stay positive, have true patience, and keep an open mind.