Undergraduates

Isabella Araya is a junior at BU majoring in Behavioral Biology set to graduate in spring 2026. She joined the lab in spring 2025, and is assisted with video data entry by organizing orangutan follow videos and coding general behaviors in the FileMaker database. 

Noa Blitz is a junior majoring in Behavioral Biology, double minoring in Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies, and is set to graduate in May of 2026. She has been attending Professor Knott’s lab meetings since January of 2024, and has worked to code behaviors seen in videos for the Orangutan Project using FileMaker Pro since September 2024. More recently, she has been organizing and polishing the files currently in the database, as well as scanning and organizing focal data from the early 2000s. She has a keen interest in evolutionary psychology, sex differences, and sociality in humans and primates. 

Ellie Bloom is a senior at BU majoring in Behavioral Biology on the pre-med track and is set to graduate in May 2025. She has worked in the Knott lab since 2024 entering orangutan video and follow data into FileMaker Pro. She also worked with Master’s student Ritika Sibal, doing markerless pose estimation of orangutan thermal video footage on DeepLabCut.

Kiyomi Genewick is a senior majoring in Behavioral Biology with a minor in Anthropology set to graduate Spring 2025. She joined the lab in Spring of 2022 and has worked on various projects. She started with behaviorally coding videos for the Orangutan Project. She conducted her first UROP in the Summer of 2024 studying the oral processing behaviors of different age/sex classes and presented her findings in the October 2024 Boston University’s UROP Symposium. Her second UROP created an organized database of visually coded photos and to produce orangutan and trait specific timelines that are used to estimate orangutan ages.

Veronica McKinney is a senior at BU majoring in Math and Computer science. She started working in the lab in Fall 2023, helping Master’s student Ritika Sibal with data annotations when modeling orangutan locomotion. Her senior Kilachand Keystone Project focuses on bioacoustic modeling for gibbon call detection.

Alexandra Morrison is a sophomore majoring in Biology with a focus in neuroscience and a minor in international relations, graduating in Spring 2027. She joined the lab in Fall 2024 and has been identifying species in camera trap videos from Gunung Palung National Park and organizing data in the project FileMaker database.  

Emma Parker is a senior at BU majoring in Ecology and Conservation Biology, set to graduate in May 2025. She began volunteering in the Knott lab in October 2023, working with PhD student Frank Short and using her experience with bird identification to process audio recordings and train pattern-matching models on the Arbimon platform. She has continued her interest in bioacoustic analysis and passive monitoring for conservation through two UROP projects (Spring 2024, Spring 2025), where she uses recorder data and a recently developed deep learning algorithm (BirdNET Analyzer) to study avian biodiversity, threatened species, and habitat quality of Gunung Palung primary and secondary forests and evaluate the success of the Village Forest program.

Kayden Thomas is a junior at BU majoring in Biology with a specialization in Ecology and Conservation, and has worked in the Knott lab since September of 2024. In lab, most of her time has been spent carrying out video data analysis and entry into the FileMaker Pro Database. She will spend the summer of 2025 conducting research funded through UROP studying orangutan longevity and aging patterns via microsatellite genotyping from non-invasive biological samples.

Amanda Wu is a senior at Boston University majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Biology, graduating in Spring 2025. She has been a lab member since her freshman year, beginning with digitizing orangutan follow data records in FileMakerPro and identifying native plants to create dichotomous keys. Throughout her undergraduate career, she has designed and established several projects, including the camera trap protocol using TimeLapse to record habitat biodiversity as part of her 2023 Summer UROP project. For her honors thesis, Amanda has developed a procedure to analyze and quantify microplastics in orangutan urine to understand the extent of plastic pollution in protected parks and endangered species. After graduation, she plans to complete her Master of Public Health through BU’s 4+1 program, concentrating in Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Community Assessment, Program Design, Implementation, & Evaluation.

Maddie Hurysz graduated from Boston University in 2025 with a Bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Biology with a minor in Anthropology and a Master’s degree in Biology. She started in the Knott lab her sophomore year assisting in entry of orangutan daily follow and video data. She then participated in 2 UROP projects researching orangutan adoption and juvenile development which she presented at the 2025 AABA conference. Currently, Maddie is working with Postdoc Dr. Amy Scott to publish this research and preparing to travel to Borneo as a volunteer field assistant at the Cabang Panti research station. 

Selby Vaughn graduated from Boston University in 2024 with a Bachelor’s degree in Conservation Biology and Ecology. She started working in the Knott lab in 2022, creating dichotomous keys to identify plants in orangutan diets and analyzing camera trap footage to help document biodiversity in the forest. Selby is currently a volunteer researcher at the Cabang Panti field site, where she is working to assess dietary hardness in orangutans. 

Evelyn Liew graduated from Boston University in 2024 with a Bachelor’s degree in Conservation Biology and Ecology. She joined the Knott lab in the fall of 2023, assisting in data entry. She then began working with Master’s student Ritika Sibal in the development of a markerless pose estimation model utilizing wild orangutan footage. Currently, Evelyn is a lab technician in the Brigham and Women’s Pathology department, studying gut microbiota and host-microbiome interactions. 

Jay Cogan graduated from Boston University in 2024 with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology with a specialization in Behavioral Biology. In 2020, he worked in the Knott Lab, helping then PhD candidate Amy Scott determine the paternity of orangutans through genetic analysis with microsatellite allele calling. Jay is now at the Cabang Panti Research Site in Borneo as a volunteer research assistant. He aids all aspects of orangutan research in the field, but focuses on analyzing feeding rates for orangutans to determine total kilocalories consumed each day and ensuring that all feeding trees in the database have the correct taxonomic identifications. 

Morgan Swanson graduated from Boston University in May 2023, majoring in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She worked in the lab from June of 2021 to May of 2023 and completed multiple UROP projects, including traveling to The University of Switzerland to measure orangutan fecal particle size in Marcus Clauss’s lab. She studies fiber and seed digestion of orangutans.  

Caitlin Chin graduated from Boston University in 2023, 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. Her Undergraduate Thesis is titled White-Handed Gibbon (Hylobates lar lar) and Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) Skeletal Anatomy and Sustained Trauma: A Critical Commentary on the Legacy of Conservation Efforts in Southeast Asia.

Julianna Dick graduated from Boston University with a degree in Biological Anthropology in 2024, winning the College Prize in Anthropology. She is 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 graduated from Boston University in 2022, majoring in Ecology and Conservation Biology, with a minor in Anthropology. She worked in the lab from 2021-2022. 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.

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.

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.