Detection of Mosquitocides in Local Lake Soil Cores
Background
This was a project I worked on in the Hadly Lab that I started in the summer of 2023 with the B-SURP program. This poster, which I presented in the spring at the April Symposium of Undergraduate Research and Public Service (ASURPS) on campus, is a formal look at my first wet-lab experience with "ancient" DNA samples. This project was part of a larger ecology project in the lab to understand how we could use DNA trapped in soil cores under Searsville Lake at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve to capture the ecological diversity of the area. My project was a 2-part process: one, to see what the quality of DNA available from the extracted soil was, and two, to see if the presence of a particular bacterial mosquitocide in the soil aligned with the known archival date when it was first applied.
ASURPS is a poster symposium that is not only open to Stanford students, but also to the ProFros (prospective freshmen) and alumni who are on campus for Admit Weekend and their class reunions, so I wanted to make sure that this poster was bright, approachable, and understandable, even for people who have no experience with ecology or genetics.
Reflection
Creating this poster and presenting it was somewhat challenging because of the open format of the poster session. At most other poster sessions that I've been to, the audience is in some way familiar with some element of the research topic. However, because of the deliberate non-specificity of this event, I wanted to create a poster that reflected the principles of design and visualization that I had developed in my science communication classes, relying heavily on images, summarized bullet points, and a modern sans-serif typeface to reduce the amount of visual clutter, which is a consideration often missing from scientific posters that I used to try and make my research more accessible to whoever was interested in my poster.
The experience of actually talking to someone and presenting the research was a helpful exercise in learning how to modulate between more and less technical language in the short spiel, as some people that came up to me had some experience in ecological research, while others had no knowledge of anything outside of the mosquitos that were the basis of my research. Developing this skill as I progress in my career as an aspiring researcher is incredibly important, and something that I continue to practice today whenever someone asks me what I'm interested in.