Student Highlight
August 2024 Student Highlight
Emily Melendez
Emily Medelez is a first-generation graduate student researcher at the School of Integrative Biological and Chemical Sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences with a minor in Sociology and Summa Cum Laude Honors in 2022. After receiving her bachelor’s, she had the opportunity to serve as a teaching assistant and graduate research assistant and has taught and mentored several undergraduate students. She is dedicated, hardworking, and always eager to learn.
She is currently working under the mentorship of Dr. Pushpa Soti and Dr. Christopher Vitek. Her research investigates how invasive plants affect mosquito behavior. The goal of this study is to provide valuable data to enhance control strategies to reduce the transmission of vector-borne diseases. She has shared her findings at multiple conferences such as the American Mosquito Control Association, Texas Hispanic Farmers and Ranchers Conference, the National and Regional Conferences of Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences, and the College of Science Annual Research Conference at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She was awarded with the Alate Award which includes all travel expenses paid to present her work at the Entomological Society of America Annual Conference 2024. In addition, she won the Best Graduate Oral Presentation award at the UTRGV College of Science Annual Research Conference 2024. After her MS degree in Biological Sciences, she plans to further her education with a PhD in both ecological and entomological fields.
April 2021 Student Highlight
Consuelo Aguilar
Consuelo Aguilar is a nontraditional, single mom, first-generation college graduate student majoring in Biology, concentrating her studies in vector-borne disease at UTRGV. In 2016, during her undergraduate studies, she was invited by her professor, Dr. Feria, to participate in a bilingual (English-Spanish), bi-national project to work on Aedes mosquito surveillance. Due to her great initiative and perseverance, she received a scholarship to participate in the project and was assigned to be the captain of the six undergraduate students who had to monitor 300 mosquito traps. During that time, she completed mosquito-borne surveillance training provided by the University of Texas El Paso, and Texas AgriLife Research in Weslaco. This catapulted her passion and interest for insects creating a further goal to start tracking the importance of public health, vector-borne disease, and ecology. She started her master's in biology on tick-borne diseases. She is currently participating in the project titled “Survey of fleas and tick collected from cats and dogs for evidence Rocky Mountain –Spotted Fever and Typhus Fever in the urban and rural areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in Texas.” She also started molecular work with ticks in Dr. John Thomas's lab, which had to stop due to COVID-19. Additionally, she has mentored several of Dr. Feria's undergraduate students interested in learning about tick research. She has participated in conferences presenting her research experiences in bilingual posters and obtaining Honorable Mention in her service-learning "Conservation Biology." She is one of the co-authors of an article published in February 2020 in the SAE Journal and is currently working on her thesis project. Her project, a survey titled "Ticks and Their Possible Transmitted Diseases Survey," is now accessible in either English or Spanish and is being conducted in the transboundary region of Texas and Tamaulipas, Mexico. After graduation, she would like to continue researching the epidemiology field to incorporate all of her knowledge into public health and vector-borne diseases. She acknowledges all her accomplishments could not have been possible without her family’s support, advisors, professors' guidance, the teamwork with other students, and learning from her own mistakes. The Aedes mosquito surveillance project was supported by CENAPRECE via the US-Mexico Border Infectious Disease Surveillance (BIDS) Cooperative Agreement (CDC and the Mexican Ministry of Health) administered by the Fundación México-Estados Unidos para la Ciencia (FUMEC). Consuelo’s master’s research work has been possible thanks to three scholarships that she’s received. One from the Global Change Studies and two from the Fred W. and Frances H. Rusteberg Faculty Fellowship in Science and Technology Endowment position, both granted to Dr. Teresa Patricia Feria-Arroyo.
August 2020 Student Highlight
Jasleen Kaur
Jasleen Kaur (MS Biology, Kariyat lab) thesis project under the mentoring of Dr. Rupesh Kariyat, has previously established that inoculating the sorghum seeds with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can not only boost the plant growth traits, but also improve its defense traits, and ability to selectively attract beneficial insects and repel herbivores under field conditions (Kaur et al., 2020). In addition, Jasleen used an electrophysiological technique called electrical penetration graph (EPG) to examine how surface defenses and underlying chemical defenses in Sorghum, possibly enhanced by AMF affect probing and feeding of SCA, key components to understanding SCA development, and vector dynamics in this system. Her experiments using behavioral, feeding, and population assays show promising results for using AMF against SCA. Both population growth and feeding behavior of SCA on AMF inoculated plants were found to be significantly impacted when compared to control plants. The funding for this project was through Transforming the World Strategic Plan Award to Dr. Rupesh Kariyat from UTRGV. Jasleen graduated this summer and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida Entomology Department.
April 2020 Student Highlight
Xochitl Estrada
Xochitl Estrada is a first-generation college student majoring in Biology at UTRGV. She originally came to UTRGV wanting to pursue a career in the medical field and began as a biomedical sciences major, but during her fist-year switched to biology as her passion and interest wasn't in the medical profession. She received a Howard Huges Medical Institute (HHMI) fellowship for research after her freshman year and started with research activities very early on. In 2017, she took a course in Medical Entomology and was fascinated by the field that combined science with medical importance. The guests' speakers piqued her interest in the field even more, and she decided to pursue that as a research direction.
She started working in Dr. Vitek's laboratory in 2019, volunteering with ongoing projects and began her own research project on the evolution of insecticide resistance in the summer 2019. Throughout her research and class activities, she became more fascinated with zoonotic diseases, vector-borne disease, and the role that insects can play in health. Of particular interest in how vector biology and disease transmission may change in response to the climate crisis. In addition to her own project, she assists with multiple projects including one that was initiated by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
After she graduates, she plans to pursue a master's degree and eventually a Ph.D. to become a medical entomologist. She enjoys the laboratory work she is currently doing, including fieldwork, identifying mosquitoes, and helping control the threat of mosquito-borne diseases like the Zika virus.
The most challenging obstacle she has faced along the way is being a first-generation college student. She wasn't sure what to expect or how to ensure success and felt a little lost early on. Through mentorship with faculty, research advisors, and fellow students as well as the continued support of her parents and family, she has succeeded and excels in the educational pursuits and looks forward to the next challenge.