Sylvia Kinosian
University of Vermont ’15
Round River Taku 2014
This past September, almost exactly two years after I packed my bags for a semester in Patagonia, I started a PhD program at Utah State University. I hadn’t been sure if I wanted to go to graduate school for most of my undergraduate career, but my trips with Round River to British Columbia and Chile helped me to realize a passion for research and its role in conservation. More specifically, experiencing such different (but surprisingly familiar) ecosystems in the northern and southern hemispheres made me interested in large-scale patterns of evolution and speciation. After being able to contribute directly to conservation work done by Round River, I wanted to continue to learn and share new information through my own studies.
For my dissertation I’ll be studying plant systematics and genetics, working the fern genus Ceratopteris. This genus has historically been understudied, but work is currently being done to sequence a genome for one of the species within Ceratopteris. This will be the first genome available for ferns, an important addition to the other genomes that have been sequenced for flowering plants, conifers, and mosses. Having reference genomes available for each distinct plant lineage is crucial to be able to understand large-scale patterns of evolution across land plants. I hope to contribute to the greater understanding of land plant evolution by investigating the evolutionary relationships and patterns of hybridization with Ceratopteris, which hopefully will be beneficial to larger-scale studies in the future.
This winter, I’ll be spending the month of January in Costa Rica, attending a tropical fern systematics class. I’m really looking forward to returning to Latin America and the chance to learn more about a new ecosystem. In the next few years, I will be doing more field work in Central America, collecting and observing my study group in the field. I feel very fortunate to continue traveling in graduate school; my time abroad was one of the most important parts of my undergraduate experience. The nearly five months that I spent with Round River in 2014 was an amazing adventure, and one that has definitely helped me to realize the direction in which I want my scientific career to go.
