When most high school students consider their futures, the path to college often seems a straightforward journey. However, for those like Sierra Planck, who spent a significant portion of their youth in the foster care system, the road to higher education can be filled with uncertainty and unique challenges. Through the Arizona foster care system and help from Arizona State University, Planck is pursuing her passion for wildlife and conservation.

Having been in foster care for a long period of her youth, financial concerns and the complexities of navigating higher education as a foster youth were daunting. "I wasn't even sure that I would be able to attend university at that point in my life," Planck says. "I thought maybe I could afford going to community college and then transfer to ASU afterward." 

Arizona's Department of Child Safety (DCS) collaborates with various organizations to provide educational assistance. This support extended beyond covering exam fees and help with college expenses, it also covered prom and extracurricular costs in high school. Contrary to common misconceptions, foster youth do not automatically receive free tuition at state schools; eligibility and application for scholarships are necessary steps. Among the notable scholarships Planck received were the Obama Scholarship and the Nina Scholars Legacy Program, founded by conservationist Nina Mason Pulliam to aid disadvantaged youth and adults.

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Upon turning 18, foster youth in Arizona can choose to exit the system or stay voluntarily until 21, receiving a gradually decreasing living stipend. For Planck, remaining in the system was a strategic choice, allowing her to focus on her education and ambitions. Determined to excel, she pursued a scholastic diploma, which included taking specialized classes, participating in a veterinary assistant program near ASU Polytech. Despite an initial interest in veterinary medicine, she soon realized her true calling lay elsewhere.

"I used the Kuder Career Navigator to explore various career options," she explains. "Eventually, I found my passion in conservation biology and ecology." This decision was bolstered by the practical experiences they sought out, including interviewing professionals in wildlife organizations and volunteering at a local animal shelter and the Phoenix Zoo.

Thriving at ASU: Clubs, research and community

Planck received her degree from the School of Life Sciences in conservation biology and ecology with a minor in sustainability.

Her time at ASU was marked by active involvement in various clubs and organizations. She was a member of the ASU Gardening Club, the Ocean Conservation Club, and the Nature at ASU Club, among others. These extracurricular activities provided a sense of community and opportunities to connect with like-minded peers and professionals.

In her freshman year, she participated in undergraduate research with Corina Logan, studying the behavior of the great-tailed grackle and how it adapts to urban environments. This experience, alongside the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, further solidified Planck’s commitment to fieldwork over laboratory settings.

"I started joining clubs relevant to my interests and hassling my advisors every semester to ensure I could complete my major, minor, and two certificates within four years," she recalls. The online format of many classes during the pandemic allowed them to manage an intense course load, sometimes taking up to 24 credit hours per semester.

"Flexibility has been key," she reflects. "I never wanted to have a rigid game plan because that can set you up for failure. By pursuing multiple qualifications and gaining hands-on experience, I've opened more doors for my future."

Making a difference through volunteer work

Volunteer work has played a crucial role in shaping Planck’s career trajectory. One notable project was the black-footed ferret spotlighting program with Arizona Game and Fish, which was introduced to her by the Central Arizona Chapter for the Society of Conservation Biology, where she participated in overnight shifts to locate and vaccinate these endangered animals. This experience led to a fortuitous introduction to Emily Thomas, president of the Maricopa Audubon Society. Thomas recognized Planck’s potential and recommended them for a summer internship with the Sonoran Audubon Society, focusing on the endangered yellow-billed cuckoo.

"The internship was from June to September, tracking population data for the yellow-billed cuckoo," she explains. "Upon completion this summer, I became certified to work with this endangered species." This certification, combined with her extensive volunteer work and an internship that spanned two summers paved the way for further opportunities.

Today, Planck is a board member for the Maricopa Audubon Society, holding the position of Publicity Coordinator. In this role, she manages the organization's Facebook page and participates in various outreach events, advocating for wildlife conservation and engaging the community.

Her dedication extends beyond personal achievements. She actively mentors other students, sharing their wealth of knowledge and resources. "I want to help pave the way and make the process less intimidating for others," she emphasizes. Helping others is another passion of hers, one that she gets to pursue alongside her love for conservation. Her efforts include creating a comprehensive resource guide for students interested in conservation biology, encompassing volunteer opportunities, resume-building tips and advice for navigating the field.

In July, SOLS professors Ted Pavlic and Jessie Ebie brought two PhD students and one undergraduate student with them on a field work trip to Townsville, Queensland, Australia. While on the trip, they observed and collected weaver ants to bring back to their labs in Tempe.

The weaver ant colonies that were collected and brought back to their labs in Tempe will be used to further their research in cooperative behavior and communication & reproductive regulation within the colonies. 

Cooperative behavior concepts can be used in engineering

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Pavlic, whose research focuses on the cooperative behavior of ants, was particularly intrigued by how weaver ants manage to transport large objects in teams, despite the challenges posed by their spatially separated sub-nests. His work investigates the decision-making processes involved when ants from different subunits come together to move food items. This cooperative transport not only involves horizontal movement but also the vertical challenge of carrying objects up trees. Pavlic, who is jointly appointed in ASU’s School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, does research that extends beyond biological curiosity, seeking to apply these natural mechanisms to engineering and robotics.

“The weaver ants’ ability to carry objects up trees and resolve decision points in decentralized ways offers insights into broader natural problem-solving mechanisms,” Pavlic explained. His work aims to understand how these trade-offs in nature can inform the design of more effective robotic systems.

Anoushka Dasgupta, a PhD student in Pavlic’s lab studying animal behavior and fascinated by cooperative transport, was captivated by the weaver ants’ ability to coordinate their efforts in both horizontal and vertical movements. Her research focuses on how these ants make decision-making regarding food transport and how they interact with it.

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“An incredible amount of strength is required for these tiny ants to carry these things that are huge compared to them, like crickets and mealworms” Dasgupta noted. The trip allowed her to see firsthand the contrasts between the desert ants of Arizona and the Australian weaver ants, deepening her understanding of how these species manage cooperative transport under different environmental conditions.

“I was able to observe the ants in their natural setting, which was incredibly beneficial for understanding their behavior in the wild,” she explained. “It’s one thing to study them in the lab, but seeing them in action outdoors provided a whole new perspective.”

Decoding communication and reproductive regulation

Ebie's research centers on the communication and reproductive regulation within weaver ant colonies. These colonies, which can span up to a dozen trees, rely on complex chemical signals to coordinate their activities. Her work seeks to identify the compounds responsible for signaling the presence of the queen, who resides at a central location within this sprawling network of nests.

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“Our goal is to pinpoint the exact chemical signals used by the queen to regulate worker reproduction,” Ebie says. This research not only enhances our understanding of ant behavior but also has practical applications, such as developing synthetic attractants to temporarily lure ants away from fruit trees during picking season and then back into the trees to ward off pests during growing season, benefiting local farmers.

Ariel Aslan, an undergraduate student double majoring in ecology and conservation biology and data science, was fascinated by the reproductive communication within weaver ant colonies. Her observations highlighted the unique ways ants build their nests using silk produced by their larvae and their aggressive territorial behaviors.

“I was amazed by how the ants use their larvae as natural glue guns to weave nests and how they defend their territory with such intensity,” Aslan remarks. Her experiences in the field, including the challenges of working closely with these ants, provided a deep appreciation for the complexities of their social structure.

Aslan found the process of collecting queen nests both exhilarating. “Seeing the ants react to the queen pod was like a treasure hunt. For me, seeing this gave me a rush of excitement because I knew I was about to find the queen. ”

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Beth Ponn, a PhD candidate in the Animal Behavior program in the Ebie and Liebig labs, focuses on how the queen’s signal is transmitted across vast areas of the colony. Her research aims to identify the specific signals that communicate the queen’s presence and maintain colony cohesion.

“The concept of ants acting as a single organism is intriguing,” Ponn says. “Studying how they manage to coordinate and maintain their collective functioning over large distances offers insights into their social dynamics.”

Ponn’s research will also emphasize the importance of understanding how these signals are communicated and maintained across the colony. 

An immersive experience

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Reflecting on the trip, Pavlic emphasized the importance of fieldwork in education. “When a student goes out and is in the field and starts seeing the ants do things on their own that they didn’t make them do and start asking their own questions, you can see them get a new grounding in why it’s significant,” he says, and Ebie agrees, “It allows students to put those questions in context. They can see what you’ve been explaining and actually see and discover those nuances. It’s an opportunity to see the things we’re talking about in the classroom in real life and these interactions between different organisms. It’s invaluable in education.”

For Aslan, she says that working alongside other academics has shown her what that path can look like when she graduates. “I’m only a sophomore right now, but I think I would like to get my PhD. That’s been my idea for a long time because I want to develop my own questions, continue to learn and make contributions to the scientific field. As a student, this trip was a dream.”

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See April's featured students here. 

Gissel Marquez Alcaraz – Evolutionary Biology 

What do cancer, cacti, and kombucha have in common?  

For Gissel Marquez Alcaraz, a third year PhD candidate in the Evolutionary Biology program, they’re all model systems for studying evolution. 

Marquez Alcaraz has been interested in studying cancer since she was an undergraduate. She read Athena Aktipis, a psychologist at ASU, speaking about adaptive therapy during an interview. Rather than attempting to eradicate cancer cells, adaptive therapy seeks to control tumors to keep them from spreading, which could prolong the lives of people who have cancer.  

“It was this idea of possibly controlling cancer and allowing people to live with it. That’s what initially led me to reach out to [Aktipis],” Marquez Alcaraz explains. “And [Aktipis] told me, ‘I actually don't have a cancer lab right now. But I have space in my kombucha lab. If you do the kombucha work now, maybe you can do the cancer work later.’” 

So, throughout her bachelor’s, Marquez Alcaraz worked for and eventually ran the kombucha project in the Cooperation lab, studying how yeast and bacteria in kombucha cooperate and compete, as well as how the system evolves in response to disturbances. When she started her PhD, she finally got the chance to start researching cancer, too. 

After joining the Cancer and Evolution lab, Marquez Alcaraz followed her curiosities. She began investigating cancer in saguaro cacti, which, when infected, start branching out in alien-looking crests and folds. 

“I see (cancer in cacti) as more of a metaphor. If I can tell people a cactus has cancer, and it lived for 200 years, and it was probably one of the most iconic things in the hiking trail for years and years, maybe people can be inspired by that.” 

But Marquez Alcaraz mostly focuses on developing treatments for humans. She both looks at whether certain types of probiotics can help improve cancer treatment outcomes and tests adaptive therapy techniques in mice models, all with the hope of improving the lives of people who have cancer. She also co-directs the ACE scholars' program, which employs over 60 undergraduate researchers who are all studying cancer, too. 

“Cancer treatment is so harsh. I see it, I work with it, and I hate it. If we can provide people with something less strenuous on the body, like a probiotic, and that can help their cancer treatment, that’s awesome. And with adaptive therapy, prolonging people’s lives would be an incredible achievement. I want to get cancer to a point where people can live with it rather than having it be a death sentence at its later stages.” 

Brit Burgard – Plant Biology and Conservation 

Anyone who lives in the western US has probably heard of wildfires near where they live, if they haven’t encountered them directly. One hit particularly close to home for Brit Burgard, a second-year master’s student in the Plant Biology and Conservation program. In 2021, she was living in Superior, Arizona, when the Telegraph Fire hit, which burned over 180,000 acres –– about the area of Austin, Texas.  

Burgard was working at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum then and was part of the effort to help protect the garden against the fire. Afterwards, when she began her master’s at ASU, she wondered what the wildfire’s effects on the desert were. 

“Wildfire is increasing in the Sonoran Desert as a result of climate change and invasive species,” Burgard explains. “That increase was something I wanted to look at because the Sonoran Desert isn't considered fire adapted. But we don't necessarily know a lot about how fire affects individual species, and we can clearly see that some of the larger sort of keystone species are affected negatively.” 

To begin understanding how the Sonoran Desert reacts to wildfire, Burgard conducted a flora, or catalog of species, along the perimeter of the area burned by the Telegraph fire within the desert. So far, she’s found that some species, like brittlebush and globe mallow, can return well after a fire, as fire releases some nutrients into the soil. But other species, like saguaro, might not be able to bounce back so easily. 

With that in mind, Burgard has also spent much of her master’s conducting research att he Boyce Thompson Arboretum on saguaro restoration. She monitors how young saguaros grow when planted at different ages and with differing access to water to inform researchers who will try to replant saguaros in the future.  

“It was very fun to do that. When I worked at BTA, I actually seeded the saguaro (that I used for the project. So it was great to come back to them.” 

That work, which she does outside of her master’s thesis, has largely been funded by the Benson award, which is awarded to graduate students who want to do conservation research at the arboretum. Burgard has won the award twice.  

“I’m extremely honored to have received that award. It was really awesome because it allowed me to focus on my work.” 

By studying both the after effects of wildfire and looking into strategies to help the desert rebound, Burgard’s work should help other researchers better protect the Arizona wilderness in the face a of a changing climate. 

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See March’s featured students here.  

The research that goes on in the School of Life Sciences spans a huge and fascinating variety of subjects. The graduate students who make up SOLS are no less diverse or interesting, arriving at their respective research from different places and with different passions. Here, we recognize a handful of these graduate students, their work and what motivates them to pursue it. 

Allison Hays – Neuroscience 

Our childhood experiences have a huge impact on the rest of our lives; they shape our beliefs about the world, the relationships we form, and our physical and mental health well into adulthood. Allison Hays, a second-year neuroscience PhD student in the BEAR Lab, is diving deeper into understanding how our experiences are so impactful by exploring their interaction with genetics. 

Hays specifically thinks about how childhood experiences affect certain cognitive functions, like the ability to remember things, pay attention, and switch easily from one task to another. But rather than looking at the brain to figure this out, she looks at our spit––the easiest way for her to get samples of DNA. When she looks at spit samples, she doesn’t just try to read the DNA they contain; she’s more interested in seeing how the DNA within them is being regulated. Specifically, she looks for occurrences of DNA methylation, which is a modification that prevents gene expression.  

“We don't have all of our DNA being expressed at one time. There are things that turn gene expression on and off, or up and down.. So, what we look at is not necessarily what genes you are given, but what genes are on, off, up, down, etcetera. So that's then going to affect... your biology, your health, and cognition. I specifically think about how stressful experiences can be associated with poorer health and different rates of development and aging- which may ultimately go on to impact a variety of things.” 

So, Hays measures the cognitive performance of her research subjects, assesses how stressful their early childhood experiences were and looks at what genes are turned on or off in the DNA in their spit samples. With all that information together, Hays can start to understand how early childhood stress can change gene expression and affect cognitive performance. 

This holistic look at stress, genetics and brain function altogether excited Hays, who conducted related research with the Arizona Twin Project and the Memory Attention Control lab at ASU as an undergraduate. Now, she’s conducting novel work that she hopes will one day improve how scientists assess and improve humans’ health and wellbeing.  

“I think it will be extremely important for assessing people's level of health risks depending on their childhood stress levels, and monitoring whether any types of treatments or interventions are working... By looking at the gene expression, we’ll finally be able to see on a genetic level which treatments are working and which are not.” 

Isabel Torres – Environmental Life Sciences 

Arizonans might think they’re well-acquainted with the desert, having lived among its summer monsoons, soaring temperatures, and temperamental dust storms. But most Arizonans have no idea why the desert is important. 

Not Isabel Torres. The second year PhD student in the Throop lab is dedicating her research to better understanding deserts and other dryland ecosystems, which most people have overlooked.  

“Deserts are amazing. People think that there's nothing living or going on there. But there's so much activity.” 

A third of the world’s human population already lives on drylands, or ecosystems like deserts defined by water scarcity, and that number will only increase: by the end of the century, drylands will likely make up 56% of Earth’s land cover, Torres explains. To protect the people who depend on drylands, scientists must understand how to best manage and care for that land. But that’s not something they currently understand. 

Torres plans to help correct that. She’s spending her PhD doing field work to study how carbon cycles through dryland ecosystems, which is important for scientists who make models that predict what the climate will look like in the future. Current climate models for dryland ecosystems rely on data collected from other ecosystem types, which is troubling –– it means that those models are inaccurate. Torres aims to generate data that can be used to make accurate climate models, which will help land managers take care of the land. 

That goal, Torres shares, is inspired by her hometown: “I grew up in El Paso, Texas. It’s a desert. But it wasn’t always a desert. Back in the 1800s, it was a grassland. It was pretty and beautiful. But then they overgrazed the landscape, leading to desertification... So, I’m really interested in land management practices and how we can take care of the land.” 

Torres recognizes that living on drylands is tough: water and other resources are scarce, so people must work to prevent desertification where they can. At the same time, she loves the desert, and though she knows life there is tough, she doesn’t want that to stop people from seeing how much the land still gives us. She hopes her work can help people protect the land in return. 

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See February’s featured students here.  

The research that goes on in the School of Life Sciences spans a huge and fascinating variety of subjects. The graduate students who make up SOLS are no less diverse or interesting, arriving at their respective research from different places and with different passions. Here, we recognize a handful of these graduate students, their work, and what motivates them to pursue it. 

Jules Petty – Environmental Life Sciences Program 

You might think that climate scientists mostly think about what’s around and above us, in our atmosphere. But Jules Petty, a second year PhD student, studies climate by going underground and looking at our soil. 

“I choose to study soil because I think it’s a pretty strong way of interpreting how an ecosystem is functioning... Being able to identify the processes [occurring in the soil] and understand them... can give us a picture of what is happening more broadly.”  

Petty will be collaborating with Yiqi Luo’s Eco Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to help create accurate computer-generated models of how carbon cycles through an ecosystem.  

“Modeling is just how to simplify the snapshots of data that we get into one cohesive story. We can look at the old theories of what people thought [about] how carbon cycled in the past and improve upon those stories with new data.” 

Petty specifically looks at ways to model how carbon cycles through the soil in dryland ecosystems, or ecosystems characterized by a lack of water, like much of Arizona. Drylands make up a huge portion of the Earth’s surface –– about 40 percent –– but are very understudied as far as how carbon cycles through the ecosystem, according to Petty.  

As the species living in dryland ecosystems shift along with climate change, it’s important for scientists to understand how those changes will affect the way carbon cycles in drylands, Petty says: “We know humans can’t exist without the natural resources our world’s ecosystems provide. Now that we are seeing important ecosystems changing, it’s critical to understand where they are going and how they can still support our communities sustainably.” 

Petty hopes that their research will help land-use managers in drylands make decisions about how to protect their land in the future. 

Jarrett Joubert – Biology and Society Program, History and Philosophy of Science track 

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s changed the medical field and the social status of queer people forever. Jarrett Joubert, a third year PhD student, hopes to learn more about the decisions that scientists had to make when trying to treat the deadly epidemic –– decisions that have affected the lives of tens of thousands of people. 

“My research will be telling the story of how [HIV] drugs were developed, specifically why scientists chose to pursue one class of drugs over another.” 

Joubert has a personal stake in this subject: “I’m a queer Black man... [belonging to] a group that has some of the highest risk factors for HIV. I always think about HIV –– even if I don’t want to –– because it's a script that’s been put on my body. That’s why I’m so interested in researching this.” 

Joubert was recently accepted into Knowledge of AIDS, an NSF-funded research community development project creating a network amongst scholars who study HIV/AIDS. As part of the network, Joubert will have the chance to attend yearly workshops around the US with interdisciplinary HIV/AIDS researchers.  

“I’m excited because as a graduate student... you’re [working] by yourself so much. This [opportunity] will enable me to talk to a lot of other people who care about the same stuff, but study it in a different way.” 

As Joubert learns more about how scientists made decisions when developing HIV treatments, being part of the network will help him connect that history to its broader social impacts, which still affect people like him today.