Morgan Swanson is a senior at BU majoring in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, set to graduate in May 2023. She has been working in the lab since June of 2021 and completed a UROP project during Fall of 2021. She studies fiber and seed digestion of orangutans.
Caitlin Chin is a junior at Boston University, who is majoring in Biological Anthropology and minoring in Computer Science. Caitlin has been working on our orangutan chewing project, analyzing orangutan videos to code chewing behavior.
Julianna Dick is a senior majoring in Biological Anthropology, and she will be pursuing a Masters Degree in Public Health. She is interested in researching and promoting public health abroad. In the Knott Lab, she mainly works with the daily follow data from the Orangutan Project. She digitizes, organizes, and updates archived follow records using FileMaker Pro, as well as summarizing and merging new follow data that is collected daily.
Paige Hnatko is a sophomore at BU majoring in Ecology and Conservation Biology, with a minor in Anthropology, and has worked in the lab since 2021. She has organized, merged, and summarized large sets of Orangutan follow data using Filemaker, and taken inventory from various plant samples kept in the lab. Working with Postdoctoral Associate, Andrea Blackburn, she has also assisted with the reformatting and organization of Orangutan GPS data and hopes to use that for a future research project on Orangutan ranging and social behavior.
Recent Former Students
Sofia Wyszynski graduated from Boston University in January 2022 with a Bachelors’s Degree in Biology with a specialization in Behavior. In the Knott lab, completed a directed study with Dr. Erin Kane researching juvenile orangutan oral processing, which she presented at the Northeastern Evolutionary Primatology (NEEP) Conference in November 2021, as well as a fecal isotope directed study.
Sofia is currently a Junior Specialist Scientist in the McManus lab at the University of California San Francisco. She aspires to attend medical school and become an Emergency Room Pediatrician
Ashvika Rao studied Behavioral Biology and graduated in Spring 2021. She worked on a drone imagery analysis project to compare two methods of orangutan population surveys: traditional vs drone technology. The traditional ground field survey was completed in early 2020, and Ashvika worked remotely to help analyze thousands of drone images. This data will eventually be compared to the ground survey data in order to compare the accuracy/validity of this novel method.
Madeline Eori majored in Biological Anthropology with a minor in Conservation Biology and Ecology. Mady was a member of the lab since her Sophomore year when she started working in our Nutritional Lab, analyzing the fiber content of plants eaten by orangutans (pictured here is her presentation at the North Eastern Evolutionary Primatology Conference in 2018) as well as plant tannins. Mady also analyzed drone imagery of orangutan nests for her senior thesis on “Assessing Wild Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) Populations with Drone Imagery”. Mady was supported by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).
Justin Hsu studied Biology, with a concentration in cellular and molecular biology and genetics. Justin has been working on our analysis of orangutan chewing videos. He hopes to continue to gain experience in research and eventually become a lecturer at a university.
Hannah Gorman studied Human Physiology, with a Minor in Anthropology. She has worked on genetic analysis in the Knott lab on allele calling, to determine if an individual was homozygous or heterozygous at a given loci, under the guidance of PhD candidate, Amy Scott. Hannah also worked to sex type juvenile orangutans, using Gene Mapper to identify alleles and then determine if an individual is a male or female based on sex-linked markers.
Bryanna Malbouf majored in Behavioral Biology and worked in the lab for two years. For her research (pictured here), she measured creatinine and specific gravity in orangutan urine samples and examined whether there is evidence of muscle wasting with age in captive female orangutans. Bryanna was supported by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). Bryanna presented her research at the North Eastern Evolutionary Primatology Conference in 2019.
Ishrat Chowdhury worked in the lab since her sophomore year. Ishrat worked on both condensed tannins and fiber in orangutan foods. Here she is at the North Eastern Evolutionary Primatology Meeting in 2019. Ishrat has also helped with our project to bring field biology to the Girl Scouts.
