Thaddeus Allen ‘21
Major: Organismal Biology and Ecology
This summer, I worked with two graduate students from Hans Dam’s oceanography lab at UCONN studying copepods. The internship was fully remote, but I met with my two graduate advisors, James Demayo and Matthew Sasaki, on zoom each week. With Matt, I was helping extract data on the abundance of copepods in the genus Acartia with the eventual goal of determining whether there is a relationship between temperature, salinity, and copepod abundance. With Jimmy, I worked on extracting life history data such as survival and egg production. Jimmy helped me use this data to create rudimentary Leslie matrices, which can model population growth/decline using survival and fecundity data. Both Matt and Jimmy also helped me develop my R coding skills as part of these projects, which in invaluable to my future development as a scientist.
University of Connecticut– Hans G. Dam Lab
Groton, CT
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