The Silver Lab welcomed me as a work-study student in my first year as an undergraduate in 2010. I have been part of the Silver Lab for one year and my experience has allowed me to explore a field of science that I previously had no experience in. In the past, I have worked in a microbiology lab at Skyline Community College on my independent project to identify and quantify bacteria in ground beef found at local supermarkets. The following summer, I interned at Stanford University in Professor Tad Fukami’s ecological and evolutionary community assembly lab, where I studied strains of yeast in Mimulus aurantiacus. My abstract for this project was accepted to the Bright STaRs (Students Training as Research Scientists) session of the AGU conference where I presented my poster. I returned to the Fukami lab the next summer where I researched adaptive radiation in the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. In the summer of 2011, I continued work in the Silver Lab, helping at the Marin field sites as well as preparing soil and root samples for analysis. That same summer, I interned at Blood Systems Research Institute in Dr. Philip Norris’s immunology lab where I developed a protocol for cryopreservation of mouse lymphocytes.
I am interested in a wide range of sciences and while I am not sure what science discipline I want to focus on, I ultimately want to attend graduate school and obtain a Ph.D.
Contact: christinekyauk@gmail.com