Last November, a group of 犹他谷大学 (UVU) biology students and professors beelined to the Vancouver Convention Centre. Thousands of others joined them like a swarm of locusts. 大楼里一片繁忙景象。 Its visitors were social butterflies, presenting, researching, and networking. But what had these Wolverines all aflutter?  

昆虫。

Two UVU students — Kyri Forman and Marissa Ohran — won awards for their research at The Entomological Society of America (ESA), Entomological Society of Canada (ESC), and the Entomological Society of British Columbia (ESBC) Joint Annual Meeting held from Nov. 13-16 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“A lot of these meetings tend to focus primarily on principal investigators, specifically professors, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students,” said UVU biology professor Carl Hjelmen. “大学生往往代表性不足。 So, it's a huge deal that we even had this many students from an undergraduate institution like UVU get to go to this meeting. We had all seven of our undergraduate students present, whether that be an oral presentation or a poster presentation.”

凯里·福尔曼（Kyri Forman）是生物学专业的大二学生，她一生都热爱蝴蝶。 With her faculty mentors — biology professor Heath Ogden and chemistry professor Craig Thulin — she procured a rare white morph monarch butterfly to pursue her research. After looking at the butterfly’s unique proteins and proteomics of the eyes, Forman concluded that its mutations don’t allow it to see color.

“（白色变形君主）实际上是色盲的，”福尔曼说。 “They are missing pigment in their eyes. We don’t have any live ones at the moment, but we do think it's really likely just because they're missing that in their eyes, and based off of previous reports, these white monarchs have a harder time breeding. The person who raised them had to hand-pair them.”

For her findings, Forman won first place in the Undergrad: Physiology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology: General poster section. Part of her research is already published, and she continues conducting graduate-level research and working on her second paper at UVU.

福尔曼说：“能够参加这次会议真的很酷。 “I've been studying butterflies since I was eight. In classrooms, there is a little bit of a disconnect if your learning is just from a lecture; 你根本没机会亲眼看到。 [At the conference,] I got to actually meet other people who were in the field and doing cool things and learn about their work whilst presenting my work, which I obviously did not do in a classroom setting, but [through] hands-on research. It was just a lot of fun.”

图片由Carl Hjelmen提供

Marissa Ohran, a senior studying bioinformatics, won second place in Undergrad: Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity for her research in the heterochromatic genomes of drosophila, a type of fly that lives on cacti. Ohran assembled the fly’s genomes, using several computer programs to compare the outcomes.

“我使用了三种不同的组装程序来组装基因组，”奥兰说。 “A big takeaway I learned is the importance of comparing different programs to get different takes on the fly’s genomes.”

生物信息学专业将于今年5月迎来首批毕业生，其中包括奥兰。

Ohran’s mentor, biology professor Carl Hjelmen, remarked on the importance of getting students out of the classroom and into events such as the ESA, ESC, and ESBC Joint Annual Meeting.

“I'm very well-connected in this world of some of the newer faculty and entomology,” Hjelmen said. “我的目标是，‘我们能把这些学生介绍给多少人？’ [To get into graduate school,] you don't just put an application in, and you're good to go. You have to start developing a connection, then you have to have an inside source. We were trying to introduce these students to as many people as possible, whether that be graduate students in different labs, people that I know from graduate schools, or university faculty.”

For biology professor Ogden, the benefits of engaged learning experiences such as these go far beyond academics.

奥格登说：“有指导的研究是现存的最好、影响最大的实践。” “我们在弗吉尼亚大学能做的最好的事情之一就是继续资助有指导的研究。 It helps to keep students in school, improves their performance in school, and ultimately, it's going to make them successful for graduation and then beyond.”

了解更多有关 弗吉尼亚大学理学院.

图片由Carl Hjelmen提供