Biology major Zarin Raya reports on conference findings for national websites
Department of Sciences and Mathematics biology major Zarin Tasnim Raya attended the 2025 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA, from 3-7 January 2025. While at the conference, Zarin wrote up summaries of some of the research being presented there for two national websites.
Zarin wrote a summary of research by Dr. Austin Garner at Syracuse University on the impact of urbanization on anole locomotion for the blog Anole Annals.
Anole Annals is a website run by and aimed at “anolologists” or people that study anole lizards. On the site, contributing scientists share research news and updates related to anoles and other lizards. The site often seeks contributions from scientists going to conferences, that would be willing to check out and summarize anole-related presentations.
Dr. Travis Hagey, Assistant Professor of Biology in the Dept. of Sciences and Mathematics, has had his own research featured in Anole Annals before, and also written blog posts for the site. When Dr. Hagey learned that Raya was interested in Science Communication, he encouraged her to contact the site and volunteer to report back from the SICB Annual Meeting for them, which they gladly accepted.
Dr. Hagey also put Zarin in touch with the Life in the City website, who also accepted her offer to report from the conference. Life in the City is a is a blog launched in 2018 by researchers at New York University, Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Toronto. The site serves as a communication hub for researchers worldwide to share and discuss research on the impacts of urban environments and how species adapt to them.
For Life in the City, Zarin summarized the research of Emerald Lin, a New York University undergraduate researcher, on the impact of urban heat islands and wetlands on avian diversity
Zarin was one of five students in total from the Dept. of Sciences and Mathematics who attended the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, their travel expenses funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA. In addition to reporting on the research that was being presented, Zarin also presented her own poster at the conference, titled “Genome analysis of Aeromonas hydrophila strain S14-452″
The small, personalized nature of MUW means that departments like the Dept. of Sciences and Mathematics get to know their students individually. By getting to know them, we can help students like Zarin get the experiences that will help in their professional development, whether it is in science writing for a national audience, or attending and presenting at scientific conferences, or in the case of Zarin, both.