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Undergraduate Spotlight
See the work that is being done by our hardworking undergraduate students at EcoEvo.
Yuu-u (Loy) Hashimoto, an undergraduate, was named URECA's Researcher of the Month in October 2024 for
her work on impacts of nutrition-driven phenotypic plasticity on teeth in Ecology
& Evolution as well as crystallin aggregation in the eye in Physiology & Biophysics.
She started research her freshman year and has continued summer research as both a
member of the SUNY SOAR inaugural class (2023) and a summer URECA scholar through
the presitigious Chhabra-URECA fellowship. More information is here: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/ureca/feature/_bio/2024/October2024
Visiting undergraduate researcher Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque, a 2022 Hearst Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow, recently published her study,
“Gene expression comparisons between captive and wild shrew brains reveal captivity
effects”, in Biology Letters this January. Under the mentorship of Drs. William Thomas
and Liliana Dávalos, she spent two months in the Ecology and Evolution Department
learning bioinformatics and analyzing differential gene expression in the cortex,
hippocampus, and olfactory bulbs between captive and wild shrews. Her findings revealed
hundreds of differentially expressed genes across all three brain regions, which enriched
pathways linked to neurodegenerative disease, oxidative phosphorylation, and ribosomal
protein production—suggesting that captivity may alter brain gene expression in ways
that resemble responses seen in human neurological disorders like major depressive
disorder and neurodegeneration. Upon returning to Universidad Icesi in Colombia, Bedoya
Duque completed and refined her manuscript, which has since gained recognition in
Long Island’s TBR News Media. Reflecting on the experience, she credits her time at
Stony Brook as a pivotal step in her scientific career, stating that it provided a
"launching pad" for her future research endeavors. Congratulations Maria Alejandra!