Students Study Genetics, Parasites, and More During Summer Research

When they’re not making new discoveries, collaborating across the country, or preparing to present at a national conference, students conducting summer research on campus stay entertained by naming fruit flies, wrangling lizards, and navigating conflicts with squirrels.

A male student shows his work with a microscope in the lab. — Senior Eric Valko shows his research to Provost Caroline Sherman.

The McDaniel campus may seem quiet during the summer, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find creativity and innovation sparking in Lewis Hall of Science and Eaton Hall. This year, 24 groups are participating in the annual donor-funded Student-Faculty Collaborative Summer Research Program. Six of them are unique STEM projects that focus on topics like national collaboration, genetic manipulation, defense against squirrels, and an abundance of fruit flies named Jerry.

The Catcher in the Fly: Gene Editing in Fruit Flies

While waiting for their fruit fly DNA to finish incubating, Professor of Biology Susan Parrish, Ph.D. and her students, juniors Camille Coffey and Payten Littlejohn, show off their research binders displaying their project name: The Catcher in the Fly.

The incubation period is also the perfect time to be introduced to Jerry — or rather all of the Jerrys, as Coffey and Littlejohn have affectionately given each of their many fruit fly subjects the same name.

“They’re kind of sensitive,” jokes Littlejohn, holding up a flask full of Jerrys. “They’re hardy, but if you stress them out, they’re done. So, you have to talk to them nice.”

Parrish and her students are working with CRISPR — a biotechnology tool used to alter DNA. In collaboration with Biology Lecturer Caitlin Pozmanter ’12, Ph.D. and Johns Hopkins University, they are designing two CRISPR constructs for the fruit flies: one that will get rid of a specific protein in the body and another that will create a tagged protein for easy tracking of where it localizes.

The protein they’re studying is vital for germline development and is more prominently expressed in male fruit flies, but it was recently also detected in female brains.

Two students in lab coats and gloves work with materials in a lab. — Camille Coffy (left) and Payten Littlejohn (right) conduct research on fruit fly DNA.

From Westminster to the Florida Keys: Insecticide Impacts on Jellyfish

In 2023, Associate Professor of Biology Allison Kerwin received a three-year grant of $437,393 from the National Science Foundation to study the effects of insecticides on jellyfish development and survival. Now, she’s collaborating with four students — junior Dakota Sentz and seniors Jessica Pronchick, Erika Perez, and Kaitlyn Lee — in the last summer of her grant-funded research.

Students sit and talk in a lab. — Erika Perez (left), Dakota Sentz (middle), and Jessica Pronchick (right) discuss their research on jellyfish.

“In the Florida Keys, they’re spreading insecticides out of helicopters and big trucks because of the big mosquito problem that they’re having,” explains Sentz. “That’s great, except for when the insecticides rinse into the ocean. We’re seeing how that affects the jellyfish, specifically their metamorphosis and their developmental pathways.”

The students are also conducting their own individual research projects on topics like the effects of light on the algae living inside jellyfish and the reproduction rate of jellyfish polyps. One of the students, Erika Perez, is potentially making a breakthrough with her data on how the T1C genetic line buds faster in the reproduction process than T1A, the line typically recognized to be fastest.

“Nobody’s published this before,” says Kerwin, referring to Perez’s discovery. “It’s just this thing that people whisper to each other at conferences. Erika’s getting us some good data on this.”

As the summer winds down, Kerwin plans to visit Florida to collect data on adult jellyfish exposed to insecticides. The good news? She says, “I think I’m seeing less of an impact of the insecticides than I would have expected.”

Science You Can See: Skin Pigmentation in Brown Anole Lizards

In a warm lab lined with vivariums, Professor and Biology Department Chair Randy Morrison cradles a brown anole lizard, barely bigger than his thumb. Shortly before, he had plucked it off the lab wall, where it had jumped. Morrison and his students are not just breeding and rearing the brown anoles here on campus; they’re also studying the lizards at a genetic level, hoping to clone and manipulate the genes related to pigmentation.

A brown anole lizard held in a person's hands. — A brown anole lizard bred and reared in Morrison's lab.

Each student focuses on two different genes. Senior Zach Olvey’s genes affect the pigmentation of the dewlap, the flap of skin on the anole’s neck that is waved in mating displays or territorial disputes, and senior Naimah Bryant’s genes control how much melanin goes into the lizard’s skin, affecting how light or dark it becomes.

“We picked genes that were specifically focused on skin pigmentation because we wanted something that would show up phenotypically or something that you could see,” explains Olvey.

They plan to take this research to the next phase with CRISPR. The team would conduct a small surgery on the lizards and precisely time an injection to influence both the maternal and the paternal genome at once. This would create genetic changes in the lizards in only one generation, a process that normally involves crossing offspring for multiple generations.

Fighting Off the Insect Apocalypse … And Hungry Squirrels

“My mission this summer is to try to sell people on the importance of insects and to have some fun,” says Associate Professor Holly Martinson. To do that, she and her students — junior Chansanique Sinkler and seniors Eric Valko and Natalia Sitek — are conducting multiple projects to fight the “insect apocalypse,” the noticeable decline in insect populations worldwide.

They are participating in the North American Insect Abundance Network (NAIAN) and assessing the contribution of insects to seed dispersal and waste removal. Collaborating with the McDaniel Environmental Center (MEC), Martinson and her students set up Malaise traps — tent-like traps designed to catch insects — to collect bugs for classification. The group’s sampling data will be logged with data from over 100 other sample sites across the United States and Canada participating in the NAIAN.

Sinkler’s individual project also involves collaboration with the MEC, as she studies how ants disperse seeds in different levels of moisture. Traps set up at the MEC and other sites hold seeds specialized to attract ants, and Sinkler measures the level of moisture at the time of set-up and again when documenting how much seed has been distributed. One of the biggest challenges is preventing birds from taking the seeds before the ants can get to them.

A student shows a petri dish full of preserved insects. — Chansanique Sinkler shows some preserved insects.

Valko and Sitek face a similar problem with their study on the distribution of a different kind of material: picnic leftovers. Using cages, they leave commonly dropped food items like pieces of hot dog, french fries, cheese, and sunflower seeds in traps and observe how much food is removed by insects or by larger animals.

“We saw one squirrel go to the cage, sniff the food, and walk away,” says Valko, pulling up photos from the group’s trail cameras. “But then it came back, sat on the food, and started eating it all. One squirrel can wipe out the whole thing.”

To help prevent larger animals from depleting the supply, Valko and Sitek deploy two different types of cages: one closed, one open. Observations from the closed cages show that the insects are doing their part for waste removal, when given the opportunity.

Diving into Pond Snails and Parasites

Pausing mid-dissection analysis in a lab filled with the gurgling sound of water, Assistant Professor Maureen Williams and her students — juniors Lindsey Cruz-Gutierrez, Charvi Shrestha, and Alizeh Khan — show off the massive net they use for sample collection.

They’re analyzing pond snails and bluegill sunfish to determine how parasite diversity and infection intensity vary across the Carroll County watershed. Comparing along a gradient of urban to rural, their closest sample source for pond snails is the McDaniel golf course.

“It’s busy out there,” says Williams. “It might seem like a very idyllic pond, but there’s a lot going on under the surface.”

To expand their sample pool even further, the team is collaborating at the state level.

“We’ve been in touch with the Department of Natural Resources a lot this summer, and we’re going to get to study some invasive Chesapeake channa,” says Williams, referring to a torpedo-shaped, predatory fish formerly known as the northern snakehead due to its snakelike pattern. “We’re going to look at the parasites, where they’ve been the longest, and where they’re the furthest invading, and we’ll try to see how those communities are changing as they establish within the native ecosystem.”

Three students stand by a pond and wear wading gear. — (L-R) Alizeh Khan, Charvi Shrestha, and Lindsey Cruz-Gutierrez collect samples at a pond.

Head-Spinning k-Fibonacci Fractals and p-adic Rings

Associate Professor and Mathematics Department Chair Benjamin Steinhurst and Professor of Mathematics Spencer Hamblen may seem like they have their students working on the same project — as they cluster in a room with seemingly endless math equations on the walls and exchange jokes — but they’re actually split into two groups conducting different research.

Steinhurst’s students, senior Ellie Riggs and junior Sophia Braun, are spending their summer creating and analyzing visualizations of k-Fibonacci fractals. These are geometric shapes and spirals formed from variations of the Fibonacci counting rule, where each number increases based on the sum of a certain count of numbers preceding it. Their favorite is the “seafood structure,” named for its crablike appearance.

A group of students stands in front of a chalkboard filled with mathematic equations. — (L-R) Aidan Wolsey, Keyierra Harris, Addison Meagher, Sophia Braun, and Ellie Riggs display some of their equations.

Sophomore Addison Meagher and seniors Keyierra Harris and Aidan Wolsey are working with Hamblen. They fill chalkboards with equations in search of Waring’s numbers — the fewest numbers raised to a particular power to add up to a number. They are using p-adic rings, an alternative number system useful for studying equations with prime numbers.

“There are a lot of theoretical science questions that you can understand better if you can break a calculation down into how it works for individual primes,” says Hamblen.

Each student has their specialty area, but they light up when talking about collaborating with one another. In August, all five of Steinhurst’s and Hamblen’s students will attend the 2026 Mathematical Association of America MathFest conference in Boston to present posters on their research.