Spring Semester Has Sprung

A lot has happened since my last blog post, so I will try to quickly catch everyone up!

I won the poster competition at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Graduate Student Symposium for my research titled " Going out on a Limb: Striking Constraints on a Semi-arboreal Ratsnake".

I attended the Ernie Liner Louisiana Herpetologists Meeting at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) at Cocodrie, LA. This was a super fun meeting, where I was able to meet lots of other herpetologists from all over the state.

I successfully defended my dissertation research proposal titled " The Morphology, Performance, and Energetics Associated With Durophagous Feeding in Map Turtles (Genus Graptemys)".

I was awarded the Charlotte Mangum Student Support Award to defer lodging costs for the 2017 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biologists Meeting. Additionally, I was chosen to be one of the student photographers for the meeting.

I had a lot of fun at the 2017 SICB meeting in New Orleans! I was able to meet some great people and all of the talks I went to were stellar. I presented a poster titled " Scaling of Defensive Terrestrial and Arboreal Strikes by Ratsnakes" which I co-authored with C.J. Hillard (an undergrad in the Moon Lab) and David Penning (Former Moon Lab, current faculty at Missouri Southern State University).

I'm excited to teach Biology 113 this semester at ULL. This is the second introductory biology lab for science majors and it focuses on anatomy, ecology, and diversity. It should be a lot of fun. We are currently developing ideas to add a service learning project to this course.

Other miscellaneous things: A photo of me appears on the UL Biology homepage (https://biology.louisiana.edu/) and I am the cover for the UL graduate school Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ULLafayetteGraduateSchool/).

My photo of an American Toad appears this month in the Herpetologist's League Calendar and on their website (https://hl.wildapricot.org/).