What does an Environmental Sciences major working on an honors thesis in UVM's College of Arts and Sciences do over Spring Break? Why, travel to Missoula, Montana, of course, to measure metabolic rates of insects. Not a typical spring break, but undergraduates doing ground-breaking research with UVM faculty are as natural as maple syrup from Vermont!
Amanda Daly is a senior in The College of Arts and Sciences at UVM, double-majoring in Environmental Sciences (with a concentration in environmental biology) and Spanish. At UVM, she has taken full advantage of both the breadth of a liberal arts education offered in the College as well as the research opportunities available to our undergraduates as they work with faculty doing cutting-edge research.
Amanda started out volunteering in the lab of Biology professor Sara Helms Cahan in the fall of her junior year and, after spending her spring semester studying abroad, has settled into the Cahan lab to do a research project that will form the basis for her senior honors thesis.
She is not just another "pair of hands" in Professor Cahan's lab, but an active member of the Cahan group, which includes both undergraduate and graduate students. She participates in the lab group meetings, making presentations and working closely with Professor Cahan. She designed her own thesis project, wrote a proposal to the College Honors Committee (which reviewed and approved her proposal last fall), and applied for and received funding for her project from the HELiX (Hughes Endeavor for Life Science Excellence) program. And, because of Professor Cahan's collaborative work with a professor at the University of Montana, Amanda has been able to broaden her research experiences and share in the collaborative process.
The results detailed in her honors thesis ("Comparison of Growth Rates Among Pogonomyrmex rugosus, Pogonomyrmex barbatus and Four Hybridogenetic Lineages") will be presented in a public seminar and then "defended" in front of a committee of faculty experts, who will then decide whether her work is worthy of College Honors.
Has Amanda's UVM education been academically challenging? You bet. Intellectually satisfying? Of course. Great preparation for her plans for graduate research in behavioral ecology? The best!
