School of Natural and Computational Sciences

Six students in the Biological Literature class, taught by Sheena Banks, presented posters reflecting the research they did during their capstone experience.

Gavin Tweeten studied insect distributions on a local property using pit fall traps, nets, and hand collection.  One of the more interesting insects he found was a 6″ tiger centipede, which is rarely found this far south.  Dr. Tierney Brosius supervised his project.

Brittney McGuire studied pocket gophers with Dr. Joel Brant.  She used GPS logging to mark active mounds near public roadways in Taylor, Fisher, Nolan, and Jones counties.  She then compared her mapped results with a published map, noting where she thought the original map differed from her results.

Kelly Green and Crystal Garcia both worked on a video-camera survey of large mammals in Callahan County.  They collected images from mounted video cameras set up to snap an image when movement was detected on a nearby game trail.  They analyzed the images to plot the number of animals captured as well as the date and time of the snapshot.  Both girls mentioned that sometimes the capture consisted of nothing but a tail!  Dr. Joel Brant supervised this study.

Kelly Hartley worked with a faculty member from the Texas Tech School of Pharmacy.  She learned a great deal about using the latest techniques for preparing and analyzing slides using mouse embryonic tissue.  Her project was a narrow portion of a much larger project focused on finding the cell origin for two types of cancerous tumors, lung and kidney.

Ben Prieto finished up the series of presentations with an overview of his experience working with Dr. Melnick, who is a local oncologist.  He discussed three drugs used to treat cancer patients:  Cisplatin, Carboplatin, and Paclitaxol.